How, at 93 million miles away, does the sun feel so warm, yet when a simple cloud passes over it the warmth is incredibly dampened?
In: Physics
It’s not super easy to explain all of it like your 5. So we will ignore the fact that the atmosphere bounces light around and traps heat. And we will ignore how heat actually works for this explanation.
Let’s go; light is energy. It’s also made up of loads of colour. Light hits your skin, and depending on the tone of your skin, a lot of thos colours get reflected. The ones that don’t, are absorbed, and the light turns from light energy, into kinetic energy. This means that the stuff that makes you up, starts to vibrate very quickly causing ‘warmth’. Genuinely serious note, people with darker skin get hotter than people with light skin. People who have tattoos getter hotter on the tattoos than the rest of their skin. This is because more light is absorbed than is reflected.
When a cloud comes over, it does two things. Scatters light (because its made of water vapour) and reflects light (because of its colour) this means that less light hits you, which means the atoms in your body don’t vibrate as much. Less ‘warmth’.
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