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Asked by clareeemorris to Betul, Bridget, Ceri-Wyn, Laurel, Maria on 21 Jun 2010 in Categories: General.
Question: Why is the sun yellow?
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Betul Arslan answered on 18 Jun 2010:
Great question!! I didn’t know the answer either so I looked it up, here it goes:
“Sun is made up of gases mainly like hydrogen, helium and small amount of other elements like sulphur, magnesium, carbon, neon, iron, oxygen, nickel, chromium and calcium. Temperature on the surface of sun is approximately 5780K giving the sun white color but it often appears yellow to us when we look at the sun from the earth because of the atmospheric scattering of light.
When white light coming from the sun towards the earth passes through the atmosphere of the earth it scatters the blue light (which is responsible for the sky to appear blue) and is left with red color light which appears to us as yellow”
a ma zing! and thanks to you, now I know it too 🙂
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Laurel Fogarty answered on 20 Jun 2010:
The sun is in fact white!! It is literally white hot, the sun is yellow for the same reason the sky is blue- it is the scattering of light through our atmosphere of ozone, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide.
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Ceri-Wyn Thomas answered on 20 Jun 2010:
This is an interesting question. I think the sun is probably closer to being colourless (white) but when its light passes through the Earth’s atmosphere this radiation gets reflected and refracted and we simply see this visible radiation as yellow light. If we were to look at the sun from space (with our naked eye- which would obviously be a really daft thing to do in reality) it would probably look quite different. A lot of telescope images of the sun are coloured yellow although I’ve seen pictures of blue, green and red suns too! (It depends on what the image is trying to show)
Also, many to animals who don’t see in colour the sun is probably white (although I can’t know this for sure!).
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Comments
clareeemorris commented on :
okay, thanks!