why are plants green instead of black, when black leaves would absorb all light energy but green is reflecting a third of the incoming light?
In: 3
Chlorophyll absorbs wavelengths other than green, which is reflected back. That’s the color you see.
WHY IS CHLOROPHYLL GREEN?
Light from the sun contains all visible colours. The combination of all these colours makes the light appear white. Chlorophyll is able to absorb all of these colours except for green. Green light reflects (bounces off) the leaf. This light is what we see when we look at a leaf, and why it looks green.
Black leaves would absorb a lot more light, and thus the leaves would get hot, much like a black-painted car gets much hotter in the summer than a white-painted one.
Plants have developed the process with chlorophyll to use the violet-purple and the red-orange frequencies of light (basically, NOT the green) to assemble CO2 and water into sugar molecules, and then chain the sugars together to form cellulose (the body of the plant). That’s the process, that’s the way chlorophyll works, so if the leaves had green absorbtion the green light would just heat up the leaves, because all that energy is NOT used by chlorophyll.
Why didn’t plants develop a use for this green light? They didn’t need to, chlorophyll works well enough for them.
Latest Answers