Can Microwave waves travel in a straight line?

Answer 1

Microwaves; like Radio waves, visible Light, and other electromagnetic waves, travel at the speed of light. This is generally accepted to be about 186,000 miles per second or about 300,000,000 meters a second in a vacuum. Depending on its medium however (such as air or glass) this speed is slower.

Answer 2

Microwaves are a form of electromagnetic radiation, similar to light, television, X rays, etc. All of these travel through space and materials in the form of waves. These are energy waves, that is they are waves that contain energy and, that energy can then be transformed into other things when the waves interact with materials. For example, in the case of microwaves, the energy in the microwave wave is converted to heat in many materials, such as food. On the other hand, when these microwaves travel through space, such as the inside of your microwave oven, they do not heat the air because the air is essentially invisible to the microwave energy wave.

Answer 3

There's no limit, just as there is no limit for light. They keep going until they run into

something that absorbs them. If there's nothing like that in the way, they can cross

the universe.

Answer 4

That shouldn't be too surprising when you recall that in addition to empty space, radio

can travel through walls, heat can travel through air, light can travel through glass and

water, and x-rays can travel through steel and bones.

All electromagnetic radiation is absorbed to some extent by passing through a material

medium. The amount of absorption depends on the material, and also on the wavelength

of the radiation. In the case of microwave radiation at 2.5 GHz, we are very happy that

some foods absorb it quite well, otherwise we couldn't cook a turkey in 3 minutes in the

microwave oven.

Microwaves travel through empty space unimpeded just as light. If truly empty space they should theoretically travel forever. Air is not truly empty and microwaves can interact with the air molecules, losing energy as it does so, but will still travel a great distance before being totally attenuated. However, material objects, such as food, have dielectric properties that affect the way microwaves interact with them and will attenuate them in shorter distances. While air has a relative dielectric constant of 1.0, water is 78 and beef 80 at room temperature. The microwave energy will be strongly attenuated by these materials and will travel a relatively short distance. In water, for example, 63% of the microwave energy is attenuated in 1.2 cm (< 1/2") and so will effectively about 95% absorbed in 6 cm. (the number is accurate because it doesn't take into account the change in the dielectric constant with temperature, but is good enough to demonstrate the effect.)

Answer 5

yes, microwaves always travel in straight line. These are used in point to point communication. microwave antennas (e.g horn,helical) that are used to transmit microwave radiations, work on line of sight.

Answer 6

There's no limit, just as there is no limit for light. They keep going until they

run into something that absorbs them. If there's nothing like that in the way,

they can cross the universe.

When communication from the Pioneer 10 space probe ended, on January 23, 2003,

the probe was roughly 12 billion km from Earth ... more than double the distance

to Pluto. The spacecraft stopped transmitting when its on-board power supply

died, but up to that moment, its microwave signals were still being received loud

and clear on Earth.

Answer 7

Microwaves, as in microwave ovens, produce microwaves which vibrate water molecules in food. The vibration of the molecules causes friction i.e. heat and so the food heats up.