What is the color of the sun?
www.wtamu.edu
The color of the sun is white. The sun emits all colors of the rainbow more or less evenly and in physics, we call this combination white. That is ...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/6080744

The sun is not yellow or orange as we see in books and movies. It emits all the colours in the visible spectrum (also in other spectrums as well) making it white!

  • apolo399@lemmy.world
    4·
    1 year ago

    https://www.scielo.br/j/rbef/a/mYqvM4Qc3KLmmfFRqMbCzhB/?lang=en

    This is something that bothered me when I was in undergrad but now I’ve come to understand. The article above goes through the math of computing different Wien peaks for different representations of the spectral energy density.

    In short, the Wien peaks are different because what the density function measures in a given parametrization is different. In frequency space the function measures the energy radiated in a small interval [f, f + df] while in wavelength space it measure the energy radiated in an interval [λ, λ + dλ]. The function in these spaces will be different to account for the different amounts of energy radiated in these intervals, and as such the peaks are different too.

    (I typed this on a phone kinda rushed so I could clarify it if you’d like)

    • dmention7@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Hey thanks for the reply! I’ll admit that paper lost me pretty quickly, so I am probably missing a subtle point. But it feels deeply unintuitive since frequency and wavelength are just two different ways of describing the same physical quantity.

      So if I have a given source of photons, how the heck does the color of photons delivering most cumulative power change whether I choose to describe that color based on its wavelength or it’s frequency?

      Is there an analogue to something like sound energy or is this quantum physics weirdness?

      (These are semi rhetorical questions… I’m not expecting you to explain unless you really feel like it 😀)