About the colour of our sun?

Question

Why does the white colour of our sun can be separated into complete colours of ROYGBIV , while our star is composed mainly only by Hydrogen and Helium which do not have complete colors or spectrum if they generate light or photon?

Answer 1

Pika is right.  But so are you.

In addition to electrons joining and getting stripped from atoms, which emit photons of very specific frequencies, a hot object like the Sun emits photons of a variety of frequencies due to their temperature (random motions).  If this is plotted on a curve, one gets a peak in the visible part of the spectrum.

How convenient.  Why is it that the Sun just happens to emit most of it's energy in the visible part of the spectrum?  That's because our eyes have evolved to be most sensitive to frequencies that are the most common.  That lets them work the best.

And what our eyes see best is called white. Other temperatures have other colors.

Answer 2

You are correct. The sun does not produce a perfect spectrum of light, it actually absorbs 4 small slivers of light, these wavelengths are absorbed by the hydrogen and helium in the Sun's atmosphere.

The reason the Sun produces all the rest of the spectrum is because it is undergoing fusion. Fusion is the process of producing heavier elements.

Because fusion is occurring then the sun's atoms are not all pure hydrogen and helium (although most are), in fact numerous suns have been found made out of carbon, iron and other elements.

Realize that not all suns are white... many can be Blue, Purple, Red, even black (they do not have to be a black hole to be black!), this is due to the composition of the sun, how many suns came before it (our sun has died 4 times so far), and how old it is (our sun is middle aged).

In fact we are extremelly lucky to have our star, "Sol", which happens to be perfect for life on our planet as well as having produced the perfect elements for us to construct fancy machines.

Note: the true rainbow colours are ROYGBV, indigo (I) was added to make the number of colours a lucky "7" which was considered a holy number by the discoverer.

Answer 3

The above is supposed to show, as accurately as possible on a computer screen, how the colour of a radiating blackbody varies with its temperature. The two vertical bars of colour at each end of the colour chart are the colours at zero and infinite temperature. Evidently the limiting colours are not much different from the colours at 1,000 K and 50,000 K. I confess a little disappointment at the high temperature result: I was hoping that the colour there would be more violet.

The chromaticity diagram at right shows the blackbody trajectory as a black line labelled with temperature in Kelvin. This chromaticity diagram, constructed using a corrected version of John Walker's cietoppm utility, is the same as shown on the  Where's purple? page.

The blackbody colours in the colour chart at top and in the diagram at right were computed by integrating the monochromatic tristimuli X, Y, Z from the CIE 2° tables over a Planck distribution. The resulting blackbody tristimuli were transformed to R, G, B, then gamma-corrected to R¢, G¢, B¢, as described on the  Where's purple? page.

Blackbody colours at temperatures around 5000-7000 K are nearly white, and the choice of white point is important if one wants to render these colours accurately. On these pages I have adopted CIE D65 as white, but of course this may not accurately represent the white point R = G = B of your monitor.

Introduced by CIE in 1963, the D series of standard illuminants are intended to represent `daylight' at various correlated colour temperatures, with D65 to be used whenever possible. The precise (slightly complicated) definition of these illuminants can be found in R. W. G. Hunt (1987) ``Measuring Colour''. The `correlated colour temperature' is the temperature of the blackbody that is, in a certain well-defined sense, nearest in colour. The subscript 65 on D65 signifies a correlated colour temperature that was originally 6500 K, but thanks to a revision of the combination hc/k of fundamental constants in the Planck formula is now defined to be (1.4388/1.4380) 6500 K » 6504 K (the latest NIST value is hc/k = 1/0.6950387 cm K = 1.438769 cm K, but apparently the definition of correlated colour temperature has not been revised again).

http://www.casa.colorado.edu

These effects should add up to make the sun appear, if not totally white, much whiter in space than on the Earth. Incidentally, looking directly at the sun in space is an even worse idea than looking at it here! If you ever have the opportunity to go into space (and I hope you do),

please don't look at the sun. :)

http://www.madsci.org

Answer 4

The sun colour is white some people say but if we apply scientific theories like newtons law of light then we get that white light is made up of seven colours vibgyor the sun colours appeares to be white but in hidden it is vibgyor