What color is sunlight? Sunlight comes in several colors

Take, for example, the seven colors of the rainbow. The "light" of the sun is made up of seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

Light is an electromagnetic wave, and the wavelength and color will be different. Among them, the wavelength of red light is the longest, and the wavelength of violet light is the shortest, so the wavelengths of the seven colors are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Because violet light has a short wavelength, the refraction amplitude is greater than that of light with longer wavelengths such as red light.

This is why the violet light is located inside the rainbow, while the red light is located outside the rainbow.

Let's put the focus back on the sun itself. You must think how it could be green? After all, when you watch the sunset, the sun is obviously white, orange and red, and it won't be green anyway!

Actually, this is because at night, when the sun shines obliquely, the distance through the atmosphere becomes longer, and the number of encounters with obstacles (air, etc.) increases. ) becomes more frequent. While light with shorter wavelengths of other colors is scattered at high altitude and basically cannot reach the ground, only red light and orange light with longer wavelengths reach the ground, so the sun will appear orange-red.

With the Sun as a star, its radiation peak is exactly at the junction of blue and green in the spectrum, so the Sun is a green star from a light point of view! Or better yet, blue-green stars. The temperature of a star is also directly reflected in the color it displays.

For the sun, its surface temperature is about 6000 degrees. As mentioned earlier, due to the error in color discrimination of the human eye, we have always thought that the sun is actually yellow and white.

As mentioned earlier, the longer the wavelength of light, the more it can pass through obstacles in the atmosphere (e.g., oxygen, nitrogen molecules, dust, water vapor); Blue, indigo, and violet light are easily scattered when encountering obstacles in the atmosphere due to their shorter wavelengths, so when we look at sunlight, the blue-green color is already blurred, which is why we think it is white. I know you might say, isn't the sky blue too?

That's because the human eye is more sensitive to blue, so we usually see a blue sky.

Do we have a chance to see the green sun? If we summarize the above statement, at sunrise or sunset, the first or last thing we see should be blue light. But blue light is easily scattered in the air, so it is difficult to see.

Usually, we see green light with a slightly longer wavelength than blue light. So, if you have the opportunity to watch the sunrise by the sea when the weather is clear, you will be able to see the green sun when the sun is only a small part above the horizon and the air quality is fresh! But only for a few seconds!

This is probably the coolest bits you'll ever see today! It doesn't matter how complicated it is. In short, the color of light changes depending on temperature and wavelength, and the wavelength of light that the human eye can see is limited, which is why the sun we usually see is not green!

Strictly speaking, the color of light is a virtual concept, and the color you usually see is not necessarily its own color, because light includes all colors, and what you see is the collection of all colors of light (just like the resultant force of force) But the different colors of light you see in daily life are formed by refraction and dispersion in the process of light propagation

Sunlight comes in seven colors, which are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. These seven monochromatic lights make up the white sunlight that people usually see, and the rainbow is actually the colorful spectrum formed by the refraction and reflection of sunlight by water droplets in the air.

In 1666, the English physicist Isaac Newton conducted the famous dispersion experiment of light, thus revealing the mystery of color. He shines the sun's rays on a prism, and the white light is immediately decomposed into seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

Sunlight is actually the light emitted after the sun's nuclear fusion reaction, which is filtered by the earth's atmosphere before reaching the ground, and its energy distribution in the visible spectrum is uniform, so it is white light.