Just go outside.
Look at trees, grass, bushes, ect. Why is it all green? Like why aren’t they all different colors? Why does it mostly all have to be green?
In: Chemistry
Chlorophyll is green and chlorophyll is the thing they need to do photosynthesis which is how they make food so that green chlorophyll turns the plants green.
Also: As far as some root vegetables go, carotene makes carrots orange and anthocyanin makes them purple.
The theory is chlorophyll evolved to be green to take the light left by purple bacteria on the ocean surface millions of years ago, then all the purple died out and green took over.
Edit: I spent to long looking through my YouTube history to get the [link](https://youtu.be/srzniA8EKDk) where I learned this. Skip to 5:15 to hear what I said.
TLDR: Chlorophyll
Plant cells are fill with Chlorophyll a green pigment. Chlorophyll is critical for photosynthesis as it helps plants absorb light.
Since plants are powered by photosynthesis and need sunlight to live, they all have Chlorophyll so they are green.
Plants are often green because of the chlorophyll compounds in their cells. This is the compound that allows for photosynthesis. Trees change color in the fall because the green chlorophyll starts to degrade as leaves die, letting the other colors show up.
Plants are green because of chlorophyll in their cells, which is brightly colored.
And the more important answer is that chlorophyll looks green because of the way absorption and reflection/emission of light works. The predominant colors of light from the sun are blues/violets and some reds, so plants evolved a pigment to capture as much of the sun’s light as possible, and convert that light energy into chemical energy. The weakest part of the sun’s light is in the green spectrum, so chlorophyll reflects green instead of absorbing it, giving plants a green color to our eyes.
Because of Chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is green and it’s what plant life uses to trap light energy from the sun, which is then used to combine carbon dioxide and water into sugars in the process of photosynthesis.
TL;DR: Plants are green because of Chlorophyll which is vital for photosynthesis, which helps plants get energy from light.
I haven’t seen the complete right answer on here so I’ll answer. Solar energy engineer here with a PhD in materials science for solar applications, and many years experience in the solar energy industry.
Our sun emits light (duh). The “white light” that we see from the sun is actually many colors combined together. In fact, when you see a rainbow, this is simply visible sunlight split up into all those separate colors – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and also a bunch of colors (like ultraviolet, or even a few x-rays) that our human eyes can’t even see.
It turns out that some of the colors that the sun emits are more common than others (look up “Plank’s Law”). It turns out that the most common color that the sun emits is yellow (about 550nm wavelength, for those who are curious), whereas x-rays and gamma rays are pretty rare. Our human eyes have evolved to detect the most common colors of light that come from our sun… we call this the “visible spectrum” which ranges from red to violet.
Similar to humans, plants have also evolved to get the most out of our sun. Plants need energy from sunlight to power themselves.
So, plants evolved a chemical called chlorophyll which is able to absorb the most abundant colors in the solar spectrum, and convert this light-energy into chemical energy for the plant to use.
As I said earlier, the most abundant color in the solar spectrum is yellow. So as plants evolved, they developed chlorophyll which is really good at absorbing yellow light.
The way our human eyes work, if you take yellow out of the spectrum of visible light you end up seeing green. So if we look at a plant, and that plant is sucking up all the yellow light from the sun, then our eyes see the light that ISN’T absorbed… which looks green.
That is why plants are green.
Edit: plants absorb blue and red light, not directly yellow light. This ends up maximizing their energy harvest from the sun. This is slightly more nuanced than just absorbing yellow light, but the idea is the same… to get the max energy out of sunlight.
Because the last common ancestor of all plant life evolved chlorophyll, a green pigmented organelle that converts light to chemical energy the cell can use. Since not all light photons have the same energy, some are reflected rather than absorbed and used, and these reflected photons are predominantly in the green wavelength.
Fun fact, if the predominant light wavelength that reached ground level was a different colour, a similar evolutionary pathway would have created different colour chlorophyll. The light that reaches ground level has higher levels of yellow light, so chlorophyll became green. If the light had been predominantly red, chlorophyll would have been purple.
Uve gotta thank cyanobacteria for that, back in early earth, chlorophyl took the other wavelenght of light from what cyanobacteria was using which also had the property of not taking 100% light from the sun (green)
Latest Answers