Neither water is blue
They take us for absolute fools
Comment on That's just science
rethnor@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
Except the sun isn’t yellow, it’s white with a slight bias towards green.
Want to check, put something white outside, it looks white, not yellow.
Allero@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Maybe not the water you drink (chugs Gatorade frost)
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
That’s why I never developed super powers.
g0d0fm15ch13f@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
with a slight bias towards green
And it’s my understanding THATS why plants are green
brown567@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Actually, leaves look green because they don’t absorb green light (that’s why grow bulbs are red & blue)
g0d0fm15ch13f@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Sorry, I gave an incomplete answer. It is my understanding that chloroplasts use the blue and red (high and low frequencies of visible light) and the remaining spectrum looks green because of the aforementioned bias with less “noise” to obfuscate the bias, otherwise chloroplasts would appear more yellow.
But truthfully I’m neither a physist nor a biologist and I was kinda hoping to employ Cunningham’s law. So if I’m wrong please do correct me. Especially if it has to do with rods and cones since those never really made sense to me
merc@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
The reason the sun appears to be yellow is the same reason that the sky appears to be blue.
Blue light is scattered more by the air in the atmosphere than other wavelengths. Remove blue from white light and you get yellow. So the light coming from the sun that isn’t scattered and dispersed through the sky (making the sky look blue) is yellow.
mirshafie@europe.pub 4 weeks ago
And here’s the correct answer, boys and girls.
rethnor@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Still, the sun is white. Sun light is white.
Are you saying the blue light is removed from the spectrum when it’s passes through the atmosphere? I assume you aren’t since you said scattered, but also imply the sun is yellow because blue is removed.
If we’re talking about sun light during sunrise or sunset then yes it gets red at more extreme angles. But the sun isn’t that color all day.
merc@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
That’s why I said “appears to be yellow”.
The light from the sun is made up of a whole variety of wavelengths. You can see that when there’s a rainbow and every wavelength from red to orange to yellow all the way to violet is represented. This light arrives in a continuous stream of individual photons.
When short wavelength photons (blue wavelengths down to violet wavelengths and below) hit the atmosphere, they’re more likely to be scattered by air in the atmosphere. Because of that, they still hit the ground, but they’re no longer coming from a direct line from the sun. That’s why when you look up at the sky you see it as being blue, because photons that weren’t originally heading toward you were scattered and come towards you from a random direction.
The longer wavelengths, from green on up aren’t as likely to be scattered by the atmosphere, so they mostly come in a direct line from the sun to your eye.
As a result, if you look directly at the sun (which you generally shouldn’t do) it will appear to be more yellow than it actually is. Astronauts above the atmosphere see the sun as appearing fully white. But, on the surface we see it as white minus all the blue that was scattered. The result is that the sun appears to be yellow when you’re on the surface with the atmosphere scattering things.
At sunrise and sunset there’s even more scattering. Now even larger particles are involved, and there’s more atmosphere to shine through. The blue is removed, but so is a lot of the green and yellow, leaving only the red, which is the least likely to be scattered since it has the longest wavelengths.
So, at sunrise and sunset the sun can appear reddish. At noon it can appear yellowish. But, if you go above the atmosphere so the blue doesn’t get scattered, you’ll see that it’s actually white.
icanbrewmushrooms@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
It’s the opposite, no? Red and green light have shorter wavelengths, so they get scattered before they reach our eyes, but the blue wavelengths are long enough that we actually at them
merc@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
No, it’s well known Raleigh scattering. Red and green have longer wavelengths than blue. Just past red, in the “wavelengths too long to be seen” direction is infrared which we feel as heat, and which just makes things warm. If you go the other direction into “wavelengths too short to be seen” direction, past violet, you get into Ultra Violet or UV, which is ionizing radiation, and that’s why UV is a skin cancer danger. The short wavelength blue light gets scattered, the longer wavelengths don’t, so the sky appears blue, and the sun appears yellow.