rest mass
Sign in to saveAlso known as intrinsic mass, proper mass, rest energy, rest mass-energy, intrinsic mass-energy, invariant mass, rest mass–energy, intrinsic mass–energy
mass of a physical system independent of its motion; equals its total mass when at rest
Wikidata facts
- Subclass of
- physical quantity
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- has characteristic
- symmetry
- maintained by WikiProject
- WikiProject Mathematics
- invariant under
- Lorentz transformation
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Encyclopedic overview
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The invariant mass, rest mass, intrinsic mass, proper mass, or in the case of bound systems simply mass, is the portion of the total mass of an object or system of objects that is independent of the overall motion of the system. More precisely, it is a characteristic of the system's total energy and momentum that is the same in all frames of reference related by Lorentz transformations. If a center-of-momentum frame exists for the system , then the invariant mass of a system is equal to its total mass in that "rest frame". In other reference frames, where the system's momentum is non-zero, the total mass (a.k.a. relativistic mass) of the system is greater than the invariant mass, but the invariant mass remains unchanged.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “rest mass” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.