is candle flame a plasma? (what even is plasma?)
i’ve always wanted to know what really is a flame… is it plasma? is it magic?
what is it? i know it’s a chemical reaction with the oxygen in the air.
In: 201
No, it’s just hot gas (of we’re talking about average fire, like the candle)
The light from a fire comes from two sources:
The red-orange flames are little bits of hot soot radiating heat away as light. They’re literally red-hot, like hot steel. As you can probably imagine, a glowing bar of steel isn’t plasma, since it’s still solid. Neither is soot.
Some other colours, like the blue of a stove, comes from electrons which are still attached to their atoms relaxing from one energy state to another. That’s why you get the nearly monochromatic light, it’s a very specific transition, and a dead giveaway that it’s not plasma. The electrons have to be still attached for that to be possible.
Actual plasma, like a star, emits a spectrum of light according to its temperature, kind of like the soot or steel but much hotter. It’s called the Black Body spectrum, because it reflects no light, and all light emitted is purely thermal.
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