How does fire produce light? How does anything hot produce light? It might be simple but I have no clue…
In: Physics
Everything is emitting light at all times. The hotter something is, the shorter the wavelengths of light that it emits.
We can only see a very narrow range of wavelengths of light. Most things, most of the time, emit light at wavelengths much too long for us to see. As things heat up, the wavelengths they emit get shorter until they are emitting light we can see, starting with red since that is the longest wavelength we can see and moving up the spectrum towards blue as the temperature increases and the wavelengths get shorter.
This is how thermal imaging works: It detects wavelengths of light that are a little longer than we can see normally in order to “see” the glow of objects that are too cold to emit visible light but are still glowing at different wavelengths based on temperature.
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