I have been wondering why gases (especially noble gases) light up when exposed to a tesla coil or a charge.
In: Chemistry
Visualize an atom’s electron as a ball. When you expose the atom to an electric current, that’s like picking up the ball and placing on the side of a ramp. The ball immediately starts rolling back down to where it was. In real life when electrons “fall back down” like this they give off light radiation. Think of it like a pie absorbing heat in your oven, and then releasing the heat when you remove it. Electricity energy goes in, light energy comes out in the gases example.
The color of the light radiation is unique to the atom, that’s why different gases give off different color lights. You might call all glowy tube lights “neon lights”, but really neon lights are only the orange ones. Different gases would give you different colors.
It’s also a special thing when the gas gives off light *we can see*. The gases in fluorescent light bulb tubes don’t produce visible white light. So in those you have electricity lifting the electrons of the gases, which gives off invisible radiation, the invisible radiation is absorbed by the white powder on the glass which absorbs it, which lifts the *powder’s electrons* which fall back down and *those electrons* give off visible white light.
gases are like a lot of small balls floating around, when there’s electricity added you give the balls a shit ton of energy, they start bouncing around and crashing with each other and that’s what produces light
Everything lights up when heated. Incandescent light bulbs make light by passing electricity through a little metal bottleneck, which heats up the metal until it glows brightly. Fluorescent lights work the same way, except electricity goes through the gas itself, heating it up to a plasma and glowing. The electricity is just a way of giving energy to the gas, which then lets that energy out as light.
Some types of light, like LEDs, are more precise with how the energy is given and how that makes electrons emit light, but most of the time the answer to your question is “by getting hot”.
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