• Question: what colour arethe sun rays?

    Asked by bobchelsea to Mark, Matthew, Mike, Paul, Sabina on 13 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Sabina Hatch

      Sabina Hatch answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      We can only see a small part of the suns rays with our eyes. Only those in the visible light range 400-740nm can be seen as different colours. But a lot of the suns rays are invisible to our eyes mainly in the infrared region. A good diagram for this is shown here:
      http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2011/05/new-technology-could-capture-solar-energy-now-wasted/

    • Photo: Mike Lee

      Mike Lee answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      Have you ever seen a poker placed in a fire? It becomes hot and starts to glow red. It then goes yellow, then white hot, and very dangerous. The reason is that the hotter something is, the more colours is gives off. Red is the first colour we can see, then green. But we don’t see green because green and red light together look yellow. Then blue, but we don’t see blue either because green and red and blue together look white.

      The sun is even hotter than blue, but we can’t even see those colours, they are bluer than blue!

      So the sun has white rays, which are made from all the colours put together.

    • Photo: Paul Coxon

      Paul Coxon answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      It is a common to think that the Sun is yellow, or orange or even red. When I draw a picture of the sun, I usually make a big yellow circle. But really, the Sun is essentially all colours mixed together. Any when all those different wavelengths of light reach our eye they appear to be white (nb don’t look directly at the sun to check this.)

    • Photo: Mark Jackson

      Mark Jackson answered on 15 Mar 2014:

      All colors! To see this, use a prism: as I explain at http://goo.gl/kwRIkD, when light passes between two different mediums (such as air and water, or air and glass) it will bend. The amount of bending depends upon the wavelength, and wavelength determines its color, so sunlight gets separated into different colors. Isaac Newton discovered this in the 1660’s, completely overturning the idea at the time that white light was colorless and that the prism itself produced the colors. There are actually even many other wavelengths, and thus colors, that we can’t see – the human eye can only see a tiny fraction of all the radiation that the sun emits!

Comments