Pratyushee Ghosh, Amity University Kolkata
Every child has held out for the yellow crayon or marker when it’s time to illustrate the sun. This common perception results in articles. Like one in Sciworthy, “The yellow sun in our sky provides the sunshine and energy needed to sustain our planet.” Pretty forgivable, on condition that even astronomers confer with the sun as a “yellow dwarf.” And Superman famously gets his powers from his proximity to “yellow stars.”
Sun isn’t yellow; it’s just an illusion caused by the Earth’s atmosphere. Yet to grasp the true color of the sun, you have got to touch a bit about light itself. Visible ray is the type of ray that human eyes can see. This ray is simply a little fraction of the energies of sunshine within the universe. Mixed, all these light appears white — but the colours of the rainbow, from red to violet, are different energies of sunshine that your eyes can see. Red is at the lower energy end of the spectrum, violet is towards the high energy end. By the time light from the sun hits your eyes, it’s travelled across the system. The Earth’s atmosphere bends, filters, and scatters radiation before it makes it to our eyes. However, do not expose your eyes for a prolonged period to observe or distinguish the light pattern. As you will eventually end up damaging your retina due to solar retinopathy.
On Earth, however, the atmosphere drains much of the ‘cool’ light spectrum, leaving the ‘warmer’ colours noticeable to us instead! The drained blue light refracts from atmospheric molecules, causing the blue appearance of our sky. The higher-energy, bluer light gets scattered more, the sunshine from the sun that reaches our eyes on Earth appears more yellow. But in space, the sun would seem white to us.
As it seems, once you take the incredibly dynamic surface of the sun, and colourize it in yellows and oranges, it’s a lot like fire. Perhaps that’s why we frequently embrace a fiery vocabulary to explain it. Astronomers also speak of the sun “ flamming” hydrogen, and popular science writes that we’re fortunate “it didn’t break before we showed up some hundred thousand years ago”.
In the case of our sun, however, “burning” may be a total misnomer. There’s no combustion, fed by oxygen, to release the energy stored within the fuel. Stars produce energy through fusion, crashing together atoms deep in their cores like vast particle colliders. These fusion reactions take lighter elements, like hydrogen, and smash them together to make heavier elements (like helium). When hydrogen atoms fuse, they release energy, which eventually makes it out of the guts of the star to shine into the universe.
Also read:SKIN CANCER KILLING BANDAGE DEVELOPED BY IISc
REFERENCES:
- What colour is the Sun? What colour do you think the Sun is?; Standford Solar Center; URL:http://solarcenter.stanford.edu/SID/activities/GreenSun.html
- Indranil Mazumdar; Nucleosynthesis and Energy Production in Stars: Bethe’s Crowning Achievement; 2005; Indian Academy of Sciences; URL: https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/010/10/0067-0077
- Kevin C. Chen, Jesse J. Jung and Alexander Aizman; Solar Retinopathy: Etiology, Diagnosis, and Treatment; 2013; Retinal Physician; URL: https://www.retinalphysician.com/issues/2013/october-2013/solar-retinopathy-etiology,-diagnosis,-and-treatm
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