According to an article in Science News, "Black Holes Take Light for a Spin," spinning black holes could affect light passing around them, causing it to spin as well. It has already been theorised as an extension of Eintein's theory of relativity that spinning massive objects would bend spacetime around them, but has never been extended to include the angular momentum of light. Assuming that light is a wave, this angular momentum change would cause it to change from a wave to a helix centered around the direction of movement of the light. New telescopes can be fitted with devices to test this effect directly, although this has not been done yet. If the angular momentum of photons can be detected, then we can reverse the calculations to determine how fast objects in the universe are spinning.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
According to an article in Science News, "Black Holes Take Light for a Spin," spinning black holes could affect light passing around them, causing it to spin as well. It has already been theorised as an extension of Eintein's theory of relativity that spinning massive objects would bend spacetime around them, but has never been extended to include the angular momentum of light. Assuming that light is a wave, this angular momentum change would cause it to change from a wave to a helix centered around the direction of movement of the light. New telescopes can be fitted with devices to test this effect directly, although this has not been done yet. If the angular momentum of photons can be detected, then we can reverse the calculations to determine how fast objects in the universe are spinning.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
this is super cool! It's weird for me to try and picture light moving in a helix because I always picture light moving in a two dimensional wave, you can't really picture it that way when its a helix.
ReplyDeleteSome Black Holes actually spin? In my article I read that if they did it would prove that the entire universe spins but they weren't sure. Cool though
ReplyDeleteThis really cool and strange! Is there any other ways that this may help us in advancement in astronomy?
ReplyDelete