What Color is the Sun?
Most people think the sun is orange, yellow, and sometimes red. The color is essentially a spectrum of different colors. Sometimes you look at the sun, emitting rays like a rainbow, and sometimes it appears white.
During the sunset or sunrise, the sun appears orange, red, or yellow. The reason behind this theory is that these colors have short wavelengths. Red has the longest wavelength, and blue has the shortest. The shorter wavelengths consisting of green, violet, and blue are dispersed by the earth’s atmosphere. This explains why yellow, red, and orange wavelengths get perceptible by our eyes.
The sun also emits light over a range of electromagnetic waves. The wavelength of a spectrum also determines an object's color. Stars with lower temperatures appear red, while stars with higher temperatures appear blue with orange, yellow, and white.
“The entire sun and all of its layers are glowing. The color of the sun is the spectrum of colors present in sunlight, which arises from a complex interplay of all parts of the sun.” Said Christopher Baird, an assistant professor of physics at West Texas A and M University in Canyon, Texas.
The correct way of viewing the sun is by using a camera that calculates the degree of brightness of lights hitting different pixels. This technique automatically gives you an approximate frequency to plot the brightness of different frequencies of sunlight.
If a wavelength is desirably longer than another, it may be concluded that the sun takes the color of the reflecting wavelength. “When we do this, we find quantitatively that all visible colors are present in sunlight in approximately equal amounts.” Added Baird.
Though the number of wavelengths in the visible spectrum is scattered almost simultaneously, it should be noted that the human eye can’t perceive by cumulating various colors of the spectrum. So, an excess of green or red light doesn’t appear green or red to the human eye. It appears white.
The actual color of the sun is white, but it appears yellow. What is the theory behind it? It’s simply because the earth’s atmosphere is more tolerant to blue light and scatters it more efficiently than red light. A slight reduction in the blue light makes the sun appear yellow, red, or orange when blue light appears at a lower threshold.
“The color content of a beam of light can easily be identified by running the beam through a prism. That’s cheap, simple, and handheld objects spread out the beam of light into its various pure color components. Each pure color has a distinct wave frequency.” Adds Baird.
Therefore, scientists use the words color and wavelength interchangeably because a ray of light’s color is defined by its frequency.
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