I mean, I know plants are green because chlorophyll is green. But why is that? Is that particular hue any better or more efficient for plants, light absobtion or energy transfer? Was it just random that these molecules happen to be green? Or is green really better than other colors for this job?
In: Biology
So we know that Photosynthesis is how plants “turn sunlight into usable energy/food” right? Well photosynthesis can be broken down into multiple different steps in a very complex chain reaction of chemical reactions.
The very first step is: how do you convert sunlight into usable energy? And the answer for that is in the “electron transport chain”.
Basically, sunlight hits a special molecule in the chloroplast and “excites” an electron in the molecule. The electron now jumps up to a Higher energy state. Where in then can be “released” through another chemical reaction to harvest that energy.
But electrons are finicky things, to “jump to a higher energy state” they need to absorb certain specific amounts of energy, specific wavelengths of light. And it just so happens that these wavelengths for this molecule are reds and blues.
Meaning when white sunlight hits the plant, a lot of the red and blue wavelengths of light are absorbed by the plants, leaving most of the green light to be reflected away.
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