One of the questions that humans have asked ourselves throughout history is What color is the sun. And it is that when we look at the sky we can hardly open our eyes due to the great luminosity that the king sun offers. It has always been thought that, both because of the lighting and because of the little that can be seen, the sun is yellow. However, is this really so?
In this article we are going to tell you what color the sun is and how scientists have been able to discover it.
Is the sun yellow?
When someone asks you to draw a sun, chances are you don't hesitate to use yellow. Or even, to add some color, spruce it up with some orange or red. Looking up at the sky, what we see is a glowing golden sphere, which may be a little redder as night falls. However, this is just a combined effect of the eyes and the interaction of the atmosphere on the ground. In fact, the sun is neither yellow, nor red, nor orange.
In fact, the Sun, like all stars that emit light and energy, emits particles of light across the entire visible spectrum, known as photons. That is, if we use a prism to separate the sunlight, we find it divided into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet: all colors visible to the human eye.
In fact, rainbows are great proof of this. Sunlight travels through the atmosphere on a rainy day and settles in the middle of the raindrop, where it is diffracted when it comes into contact with the raindrop, much like a raindrop is a prism. The result is the separation of this compact light into all the colors that compose it: the colors of the rainbow.
So, can it be said that the sun is multicolored? The answer is no. Likewise, the sun actually emits all these colors at once, so its characteristic color is a mixture of all of them: white. An example is the clouds, which we see as white due to the reflection of sunlight. If the sun is multicolored, but its color does not change to one, we will see clouds of many different colors.
What color is the sun
Like most optical effects, the yellow color captured from Earth is due to Earth's atmosphere. This layer of gas that surrounds the Earth has a large number of scattered particles that can interfere with the propagation of photons, alter their trajectories and scatter them.
The different colors that exist in the spectrum differ from each other by their wavelengths. Thus, red will be the color with the longest wavelength, shortening as we move along the spectral line towards orange, yellow, green, etc., until violet, which is the one with the shortest wavelength. However, research has shown that particles with smaller wavelengths tend to be more susceptible to interference from other particles, which changes their motion and refraction.
So when white light enters the atmosphere and encounters suspended particles, the colors with shorter wavelengths, namely violet and blue, are "lost" at the surface. Only the longest ones: red, orange and yellow, the substances known to give color to the sun. In fact, if we were to leave the atmosphere and go into space, the sun would look white because there wouldn't be any particles in between that could diffract the smallest wavelengths.
Still, surprisingly, when the longest arrival wavelength is red, the most noticeable color is yellow. In fact, the scientists explain, the yellow color is not just due to a specific yellow wavelength, but is a mixture of all the colors that can be achieved: red, yellow, orange and sometimes certain shades of green.
Why does it look redder at sunset?
So why does the color of the sun change throughout the day? Why is the color yellowish at noon and red at sunset? The solution to this dilemma lies in the angle at which the light hits the surface. This phenomenon is known in optics as Rayleigh scattering, and it makes the sun appear different shades depending on its angle to the planets.
So when the sun is setting, it is closer to the horizon, for so that to reach the eye of the observer, the light will pass through more atmospheric particles because it is further away. This results in more low-wavelength colors being lost on the fly, and the effect of red being more dominant. At dawn, the sky turns red at dawn, and this phenomenon occurs in the same way, only this phenomenon is brighter because the stars are appearing.
green color sun
In recent years, modern space exploration equipment has made it possible to exploit the very well-defined spectrum emitted by sunlight. As a result, by making detailed graphs with the collected data, it was found that there was a small peak in the emission corresponding to the green wavelength.
Although it is invisible to the human eye, even in space, there seems to be a greater intensity in the fourth color emission, since the emission continues throughout the spectrum and the result is still white. The scientists added that this fact could be due to the timing and age of the star, and over the years this emission could decrease and increase again without affecting the way light is received on Earth.
However, according to astronomer Gonzalo Tancredi, this line of reasoning is the most plausible because it lends credence to the sun's yellow tint explanation. It is that, when the atmospheric particles “eliminate” those of smaller length, the combination of those particles that arrive produces the observable yellow color. Even above it, if the intensity of the green is higher, the yellow will dominate. In the words of the scientist himself: “If the solar spectrum were mapped, it would look like a big mountain, with the peaks corresponding to the green regions. If you remove the blue part of that mountain and the shorter waves, the peaks will turn yellow."
I hope that with this information you can learn more about what color the sun is and how you were able to discover it.