How does fire emit light (the sun, a candle, a fire, etc.)?
In: Physics
Lol your “source” confirms what i said. It moves at the speed of light in a vacuum–a vacuum. I don’t understand how you earned a degree when basic concepts are so easily eluded; do you have a wikipedia source for that too? Or are you an internet troll that lies about sources and accomplishments?
IUPAC is my source, and I’m surprised you haven’t referenced any academically accredited source/institution, which leads me to believe you don’t have a degree, or you’re just a C- student with a lot of ego.
Do yourself a favour and keep studying if you want to be taken seriously.
Sun is not fire, it is plasma and would better be described as continuous hydrogen bomb explosion. But there is not burning taking place so its not fire.
The sun isn’t on fire.
Other answers have explained that hot things glow with visible light. But the sun is hot because there is nuclear fusion going on, not because it is burning because it isn’t.
Everything emits light.
Hot things produce visible light. Cold things emit lower energy radio waves that can’t be picked up by human eyes.
Everything emits light. The light is different colors depending on its temperature.
If something is ~~too hot or~~ too cold, then the color of light it emits is not a color our eyes can see. But if it is just hot enough, the light it emits is a color we can see.
edit: strikethrough fix
Scrolling through reddit, read the question.. “yeaah.. how tf does that happen”
Click.
Imagine you are holding two very soft citrus fruit (i.e. clementine.) You start to shake your hands back and forth uncontrollably and so violently that you start squeezing the fruit hader trying to hold on to it but eventually it’s sweet juices bursts from its thin peel.
In this analogy Your hands are two charged particles and how fast they vibrate when the juice leaves the citrus is the frequency of the elecrto-magnetic spectum where visble light begins
When you feel the heat from fire, you are feeling atoms in the fire shoot off their energy because it’s too much for them to hold. That energy hits your skin and turns into heat.
But, that fire sends out energy of all kinds, some you can see and some you can’t. The energy you can see becomes all of the colors only once it hits your eyes and your brain interprets it. But there are “colors” that our eyes and brains can’t see, too. The closest ones to our sight are called “ultra-violet” and “infrared”. Others include X-Ray, microwave, radio wave, and gamma rays. They are all just forms of energy that wiggle around at different speeds. We use tools to “see” and use the different “wavelengths” of energy.
Ultimately, the universe doesn’t care whether or not fire emits light. Fire emits energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation which likes to wiggle about space to the tune of many different beats. Our brains happen to interpret a few of those beats and show them to us as light.
Light is a wave, like water. Water waves are made when something disturbs the water, like dropping a pebble into the water. If something jostles the the pebble another rippe is sent out.
Light is a wave in something like water, called an electro magnetic field. This is the thing you feel when you try and place to magnets close to each other. Instead of pebbles, whenever an electron is bumped it makes ripples in this field. That ripple is light.
The reason the electrons are getting bounced in a fire is because hot materials have faster moving atoms (that’s what temperature really is, fast or slow atoms). If they collide they bounce the atoms and electrons around, causing ripples (light) to spread out from the impact.
Think of electrons like they are cars moving down the highway, and photons (light) like a signal drivers use when they are switching to a slower lane. The slower cars are on the right, and the faster cars are on the left (in America under ideal driving conditions). As slow cars get more energy, they go faster and switch to the next lane over to their left. They can also lose energy, slowing down in the process, but when they do this, they use their signal and emit light.
Now, think of a light bulb while thinking about these cars. You turn on the switch and electricity moves through the light bulb, giving those cars (electrons) lots of energy. Those cars move over into the left lanes because they are going really fast now, but they don’t want to stay there. So, the cars move back over a lane, using their signal (the electron emits a photon) each time they do this. So long as there is electricity powering that light bulb, these cars (electrons) will keep changing how fast they’re going and using their signal, “creating” light.
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