Why do materials get white hot?

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What causes the color change when things start glowing because they are so hot?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Light is made of photons. Photons carry energy, and their energy is related to their frequency.

Color is also related to frequency.

So, blue light has a higher frequency and therefore more energy in each of its photons than red light.

Hotter objects have more energy in each atom bouncing around, so the photons produced by these atoms bouncing off of one another have (on average) higher energy.

So, a hotter bunch of atoms produces higher energy photons, and higher energy photons are bluer.

At room temperature, most of the glow happens at frequencies so low that humans can’t even see them. As it heats up, the glow begins to include redder frequencies, and at really high temperatures it includes all visible frequencies.

All visible frequencies is what we call “white”.

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