question time

[brandy]

ok, what color is the sun?
simple question you would think..but if you look at it from outside it looks yellow.
yet in pics from space it looks red.
and then again i have seen pics where its like a shining white lights..
it has blues and reds and oranges in it..
so what color is the sun?
ive read this before but cant remember what kind of star it is..
so come on guys lets get our thinking caps out and our google fingers ready *G*

[Colin Manson]

Class Temperature Star color
O 30,000–60,000 K Bluish ("blue")
B 10,000–30,000 K Bluish-white ("blue-white")
A 7,500–10,000 K White with bluish tinge ("white")
F 6,000–7,500 K White ("yellow-white")
G 5,000–6,000 K Light yellow ("yellow")
K 3,500–5,000 K Light orange ("orange")
M 2,000–3,500 K Reddish orange ("red")

The Sun is not in fact a yellow star, but has essentially the color temperature of a black body of 5780 K; this is a white with no trace of yellow which is sometimes used as a definition for standard white.

(Didn't have to google for the answer but I thought it would helpful. I just read the answer a few days ago in one of my photography books. :) )

[©Amethyst]

I don't know what colour the sun is - you're not supposed to look at it! :lol:

[brandy]

umm colin your chart says its yellow at 5780 k..

[JAWS]

The sun almost certainly emits white light otherwise there would be no such thing as rainbows, all you would see was the colour of the light the sun was emitting.

I must admit though, it is rather a long time since I gave thought to such matters.

[George Brims]

The sun is a pale yellow star. That is, there is a wee bit more light in the middle of the visible range than at the ends.

[JAWS]

That makes sense. I've often wondered why the colours at either end of the spectrum in a rainbow were more difficult to see and that would appear to explain it.

[Tristan]

The sun and other obects emit a broad spectrum of energy.
Only a very small portion of its energy emitted in the universe is emitted as visible light (see http://www.usbyte.com/common/approximate_wavelength.htm and any other googled source)
Red is at one end of the spectrum (low frequency long wavelength and violet at the the other high frequency short wavelength).
As for the rainbow, our eyes are designed to see best at the middle of the range so reds and violets which are at the extremes of visible light are harder to see.
The same can be said for our ears which are designed to hear best at around the pitch of a normal voice, sounds at lower or higher frequencies are often harder to hear.

[brokencross]

Take your pick..http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=450239&in_page_id=1965

[brandy]

*grins* its amazing how a simple childlike question can be interesting.
and open us up to thinking about something that we wouldnt normally think of.
now heres one for you.. its something i first asked when i was about 7ish?
and everyone i asked just told me to shut up.. not to be stupid.. that blue was blue and green was green.. *G*
anyway the question is.. how do we know what colors are?
i mean every one KNOWS the sky is blue the grass is green clouds are white..ect..ect..ect..
but what about the actuall color not the name.
how can we know that what you are seeing and what i am seeing are the same thing?
why couldnt i see what you consider blue as green and vice versa?
how do we know that we are all seeing the same color.. we would say its that color because whe have been taught that the color we are seeing is a certain color shade ect..
know what i mean?

[j4bberw0ck]

Excellent topic, Brandy! I'm hoping it's open house for questions......

At 14 I was thrown out of a physics class at school for pushing for an answer to the question "what is a magnetic field"? The teacher insisted it was lines of magnetic force; I said I knew that, but what were the "lines of force" made of? Or if not made of something, what are they? They're clearly not radiation, nor any sort of substance, nor a flow of particles.

So although I'm not conscious of having done so, I must have pushed my luck too hard because the guy slung me out on my ear for the rest of the lesson. Great motivation.

Then five years ago, I went to a lecture in the Orkney Science Festival about - you guessed it - magnetism (and stars, as it happened) and listened to two eminent professors talk about magnetic fields for an hour without any explanation of what they are. So at the end, I buttonholed them, explained about my physics teacher and asked if they could tell me, please, after all these years, what is a magnetic field? "Ah", they said, followed by much laughter, "we disagree on that one". The Professor from Strathclyde whose name now completely escapes me got as far as saying it's a deformation of spacetime (I think) before they got so involved in their discussion that I got shut out and they forgot I was there.......:roll: . Academics, huh? All the social skills of 2 year old :lol: .

So can anyone out there tell me? What is a magnetic field? How is it formed? What sustains it?

[Elenna]

I worked in a planetarium for a time, and in the starshows and lectures we used to present to the public (especially children on school trips :)) our sun was described/defined as being an "average yellow dwarf star".