Practice portal › Electromagnetic Waves › Maxwell's Equations and the Production of EM Waves
Asked in GSEB Board March 2016 · Sources: the accelerated charge and Hertz
Idea: a charge at rest has a static field, and a charge in uniform motion carries its field along with it; in neither case does anything travel away from it.
When the charge accelerates, the field cannot follow rigidly: a kink in the field lines breaks away and travels outwards at speed c.
That travelling disturbance is an electromagnetic wave, and it carries energy away from the charge -- which is why a transmitting aerial has to be fed power all the time.
So an accelerated charge emits energy, in the form of electromagnetic radiation.
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