Driving down the road yesterday they were repairing some electrical lines and I guess one of them sparked and it left a trail of blue sparks on the ground. But when I hook up a battery and short it with a wire sparks appear an orangish-yellow color.
Anyone know why?
In: Engineering
Electricity doesn’t have a color. Light is made of tiny particles called photons, while electricity is made of electrons. When you “see” electricity, you are seeing a side effect of electricity, not the electricity itself. When electricity moves in outer space, where there is nothing for it to interact with, it is invisible!
When you see sparks or lightning on earth, you are seeing ionized air created by electricity. Ionized oxygen and nitrogen glow a blueish color, and together oxygen and nitrogen make up about 99% of the atmosphere. If Earth’s atmosphere was made of a different gas, sparks and lightning would be a different color! For instance a planet with an atmosphere made mostly of Neon would have bright red lightning!
When you see red or yellow “sparks” caused by electricity (such as coming off an electric welder or the explosion of an electric transformer), you aren’t seeing electricity, but tiny pieces of metal heated up to red or yellow hot. Electricity heated these pieces up and caused them to break off and fly away, but the electricity is invisible. You can see similar sparks come from non-electrical causes such as a flint/steel fire lighter, or metal being ground with abrasives.
There is another type of electricity-to-light effect you see every day but might not notice: light bulbs! There are several types of electric lights. In none of them do you “see” electricity, only its side effects.
1. Old fashioned incandescent bulbs – these work by heating up a wire to be very very hot, so that it glows yellow white. There is a protective glass bulb around the wire filled with gas that prevents the wire from burning up.
2. Arc bulbs – these work almost like lightning! Electricity flows through a gas inside the bulb and ionizes the gas, creating light. Different gasses glow different colors. White fluorescent lamps are a special type of arc bulb. Another common type are the yellowish bulbs used in some street lamps, which are filled mostly with sodium gas, which glows yellow when ionized.
3. LED light bulbs are the newest type and are becoming more common. They use a special type of chip like in a computer that converts electrical energy to light energy. The electricity flows through the chip invisibly, the light is emitted by the chip due to complicated physics that are beyond ELI5.
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