Light (photons) is made of energy that propagates as spherical waves. Energy keeps on changing from one form into the other as energy follows entropy -from order to disorder. All objects in the universe are just doing this constantly. Light or photons last for a long time. But they must have a life span. They do not exist eternally. Once emitted from a source, light (photons) immediately become orphan. The source of light keeps on moving away from the location it emitted light(photons). This is true for all lights (photons). Light follows the same laws followed by sound waves which are also made of energy. Values of wave length, frequency and intensity are fixed by the source emitting light. They are property of the source only. After traveling a long distance away from the source, values of these parameters change. Wave length gets larger, frequency and intensity get less. If an observer moves towards the source from this location, he will experience blue shift. If he moves away from the source, he will experience red shift. The speed of light is independent of the speed of the source emitting light. But it is not independent of the speed of the observer. The speed of light is not constant through out the universe. Light (photons) get tired after a long time and get absorbed by objects in the universe. Light (photons) begin their journey from atoms, and end their existence into atoms. Nothing in the universe can restore values of wave length, frequency and intensity which has been changed from values set by the source.
The notion of the speed of light as the cosmic speed limit is based on the assumption that particles of light, called photons, have no mass. But astrophysical observations cannot rule out the slim chance that photons do have a tiny bit of mass—a prospect with wide ramifications in physics. For instance, if photons weigh nothing at all, they would be completely stable and could theoretically last forever. But if they do have a little mass, they could eventually decay into lighter particles. Now, by studying ancient light radiated shortly after the big bang, a physicist has calculated the minimum lifetime of photons, showing that they must live for at least one billion billion years, if not forever.
That lifetime may sound like an eternity, but to a photon traveling at light speed, it passes in a relative blink. Because of the time-dilation effect predicted by Einstein's special theory of relativity, a billion billion years on Earth feels like only three years to a photon, because it's traveling so fast.
If physicists ever do discover that photons have nonzero mass, and therefore limited lifetimes, then “the notion of light-speed obviously wouldn't make much sense anymore" there would still be an absolute limit on velocities, but the photons would have to obey that law, too, and travel below the speed of light." Photons’ speed would then depend on their wavelengths, and blue light would travel faster than red light. Photons released simultaneously from distant stars would arrive at Earth at different times, depending on their wavelengths.
A photon with mass would also necessitate modifications to the Standard Model of particle physics (which posits a massless photon), the Maxwell equations that describe electromagnetic waves and fields (photons are the carrier particles for electromagnetic force) and the laws describing interactions between charged particles. Because of this latter effect, observations of the sun’s magnetic field have already proved that the photon, if it weighs anything at all, must be extremely light. The current experimental limit on the possible mass of the photon is 10-54 kilogram.
To find the limit on the photonic lifetime, Heeck analyzed observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation—light pervading the universe that dates from a few hundred thousand years after the big bang—gleaned from the now defunct NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, launched in 1989. This light fits a very specific pattern called ''blackbody radiation'', that tells scientists how intense the light should be, based on its wavelength. If any photons were decaying as they traveled across the universe, however, COBE would see less low-energy light than predicted by the blackbody radiation law, because red light would be expected to decay sooner than blue light. If the photons come from very far away, say from the beginning of the universe, then they might have had enough time to decay on their way here.
But according to COBE's measurements, the cosmic microwave background appears to behave like a perfect blackbody. No low-energy light seems to be missing, indicating that very few photons, if any, have decayed since the big bang some 13.7 billion years ago. This analysis enabled Heeck to calculate that the minimum lifetime of a photon is 1018, or one billion billion, years.
