No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
There is no upper limit, so really this comes down to how big the universe is.
It's properties would be that it's extremely low energy ... and basically impossible to detected as you'd need a universe-sized antenna.
For short wavelengths you'll eventually concentrate so much energy in one spot that it will form a black hole. So that would be the lower limit.
The idea that a very small wavelength would cause a black hole doesn’t really make sense to me since I thought a black hole requires mass. I’m no physicist, so I don’t really know.
However, a search about light with a Planck wavelength came up with this result which seems to claim that eventually the wavelength would become so small as to no longer be capable of holding information and would essentially do nothing.
What the two other replies have neglected to mention as the cool side-effect of light affecting the curvature of spacetime despite being massless is that it's theoretically possible to make a black hole out of nothing but light. The concept is called a "Kugelblitz", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelblitz_%28astrophysics%29
It's mass OR energy.
Light, even though massless will still bend (and be affected by distorted) spacetime because it has energy in form of momentum. (See: gravitational lensing).
It is affected by gravity. But does it have gravitational pull? The thing about black holes is that they have a lot gravitational pull.
I'm asking because I honestly don't know.
They do indeed. It's totally minuscule of course.
Everything that has energy deforms spacetime and spacetime affects how anything with energy moves.
Mass and energy are basically the same thing though. Since
E = mc²you can substitute mass in any equation withE / c².Interesting, I learned something new today :D
How would you create the infinite wavelength? Would you redshift a light source for eternity? Would you have to move it at the speed of light?
Infinities are generally outside of practical applications, so you wouldn't. It's more of a thought experiment.
this is actually one of the most fascinating things I've read in awhile, thank you.
Why would it be the limit? Couldn't you keep stuffing more and more energy and get a bigger black hole? Also would such a blackhole move at the speed of light?
I guess. But it wouldn't be light with a wave length anymore. It would be a black hole.
That's an interesting thought. I don't think so. Once you get the black hole it should gain mass. But that's really hitting the limit of my physics knowledge.
Nothing that has non-zero mass can move at the speed of light so no
I'd say we have set an artificial limit: at some frequency/wavelength, we do not call it "light" anymore. Around 1mm, we call it "Radar" or "microwaves", and at about 1 m or more, we call it "radio".
Unless you specifically say "visible light" I assume "light" to just mean electromagnetic radiation.
Otherwise, the answer would be trivial, about 800 nm.