are there little batteries in there??
In: Chemistry
You know fluorescent lights? They work by absorbing electricity and emitting it another way, as visible light. You electrify the gas and it glows.
Glow-in-the-dark works via a mechanism called phosphorescence. It’s a lot like fluorescent bulbs: they absorb UV and high-frequency light, and re-emit it as lower-frequency visible light. The difference is that because of the chemical structure of the substance, an electron that gets absorbed by it gets “trapped” and it takes some time for the electron to escape. This is what gives it the time-delay quality unlike fluorescence: the re-emitted light comes seconds/minutes/hours after being exposed to light.
And this is all different than chemiluminescence: what glow sticks do.
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