How does fire emit light (the sun, a candle, a fire, etc.)?
In: Physics
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.
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