Timeline for What makes Sun's light travel as parallel beams towards earth?
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5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 17, 2016 at 11:04 | comment | added | JezuzStardust | The scattering of photons is not the correct explanation. That would not lead to well defined beams of light as in the picture. | |
| Dec 30, 2014 at 9:53 | comment | added | N. Virgo | I'm not familiar with the reference you cite, and the term "photon cloud" is not standard terminology, so I can't say anything about its width. You're right that the incoming photons criss-cross each other, but the point is that they only do it a bit. (If they didn't criss-cross each other, you wouldn't be able to form an image of the sun using a pin-hole camera.) The photons' paths differ from each other by at most the Sun's apparent diameter in the sky, which is about half a degree, so they're pretty close to parallel, which is why you can see sunbeams as distinct lines. | |
| Dec 30, 2014 at 9:45 | comment | added | Sensebe | If we consider scale, earth will be bigger and bigger than photon cloud (which seems to be opposite in the diagram including earth and sun), then the angles between photons (which seems to be very very less in the diagram) makes more difference w.r.t earth, so, even now I have trouble in understanding your view (that photons will be parallel as seen in the clouds diagram), what I think is photons should come in criss-cross form. Finally, once again, thank you for the effort. | |
| Dec 30, 2014 at 9:37 | comment | added | Sensebe | +1 Thank you for the answer. Diameter of earth is 12,742 km. The width of the photon cloud from the Sun is a small fraction of a millimeter [Extracted from the book "God does play dice with the universe" by Shan Gao]. Seeing these numbers in mm and km, I think, the second diagram seems to conclude wrong conclusions (though it is not to scale, scale might make a difference here). | |
| Dec 30, 2014 at 2:03 | history | answered | N. Virgo | CC BY-SA 3.0 |