Written in SCIENCE he
¿What color is the sun? It seems more obvious than a question. However, the answer is far from what we can see with the naked eye every day, because although it may seem like a logical answer, the color of our great star is not always yellow. Although it may seem strange, there are times when it acquires a different coloration and, sometimes, even one that is strange.
The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) defines the Sun as one of the billion stars that exist in the Universe, with a gravity of such magnitude that it is capable of keeping all the celestial bodies of our solar system in motion around their orbits.
Its composition is mostly helium and hydrogen. The energy that emanates from it derives from its core where matter is converted into energysomething that happens thanks to the fact that in said core the pressure is more than a thousand times that of the Earth’s atmosphere, in addition to the fact that the density is 160 times more than that of water, not to mention that it registers a temperature of around 16 million degrees Celsius.
Currently it is estimated that inside, the Sun transforms more than four million tons of matter into energy per second, which is transformed into light into space, of which a fraction reaches Earth.
What color is the sun?
An immediate answer that millions of people could give is that their color is yellow. Perhaps others say that it is orange, and some even say that it is reddish or even white. Butwhat is the real color of the sun? The answer is not just one and depends on several factors.
The first thing that comes to mind when someone asks what color is he Sun is yellow. Although this perception of color is the constant, it must be said that it is due to an optical effect linked to the Earth’s atmosphere and its particles that intervene in the propagation of photons, causing the colors in the light spectrum to differ from one another. others by their wavelength.
When white light enters the atmosphere and encounters these particles, the colors minor wave colors such as blue or purple, tend to be lost or blurred, leaving the way free for those with a higher wave, which in this case are the colors red, orange and yellow, which are the colors that our star regularly has.
Now, if we had the chance to leave Earth, we could see a Sun of White color, this is because in space there is no type of particle that diffracts the smallest waves of the light spectrum. And the fact that the yellow color predominates is due not only to the convergence of red waves, but also to certain green tones that they manage to reach.
But if we see the Sun during the afternoon it is much more common to see it in color orange and even red. The reason has to do with Rayleigh scattering, an optical phenomenon that causes said star to be colored in different tones, depending on the angle from which it is viewed. In this way, when sunset arrives it is closer to the horizon, so it is more likely that the color with the greatest influence will be red.
Can you imagine a Sun Green color? Scientific evidence indicates that there is a small peak in the emission of the wavelength that corresponds to tones in said colora phenomenon that could be related to the age of the star and its emissions of energy converted into light.
Therefore, trying to say that the Sun has a single color throughout the day, such as yellow, would be somewhat imprecise given the aforementioned factors.
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