Which is the lightest thing in this universe? Is that a photon or neutrino?

Question

I hear a lot of people saying that neutrino is the lightest subatomic particle but according to me a photon must be the lightest as nothing can travel faster than light because it gets heavier and heavier and bends time.

Answer 1

There's a subtle distinction here, which is that neutrinos are matter particles (having spin $\hbar/2$ and obeying Pauli's exclusion principle) while photons are force carriers (having spin $\hbar$ and obeying Bose-Einstein statistics).

There are three flavors of neutrino and they all have different masses. Therefore at least two of them are massive; whether the lightest neutrino is massless is an open question.

Among the force-carrying particles, the photon, gluon, and (hypothetical) graviton are all identically massless.

Answer 2

Photons are massless particles, while neutrinos have a tiny but non-zero mass.

Answer 3

Light particle is a vague term actually. There are two ways I can think of a particle being "light".

1. If you mean has least mass than photons have zero mass so it is indeed lightest. The exact mass of lightest neutrino is not yet known.
   It is actually wrong to talk about "A photon" because it is not a single particle. Photon is a "quanta" of electromagnetic waves(or light) and it not, strictly speaking, correct to call it a"particle" of light thought it has properties similar to particles.
2. If you mean which particles does not interact with other particles then the answer is different. Even though photons have no mass but they have a momentum. So when light bounces off a surface it exerts a force. $$p=\frac{h}{\lambda}$$ It means that light with lower wavelength, $\lambda$, will have higher momentum, $p$.
   So momentum of photon depends on it's energy and can be greater than momentum of a neutrino.