Question

Color of the light-emitting from the Sun

Answer 1

Answer: White

Explanation:

While many students think the Sun appears yellow or orange, the actual color of sunlight is white. This might surprise you because we often see the Sun looking yellow during the day or orange during sunset, but these color changes happen due to Earth's atmosphere, not because of the Sun's true color.

The Sun emits light across the entire visible spectrum, which includes all colors from red to violet. When all these colors combine together, they produce white light. You can think of it like mixing all the colors of paint - when you combine them all, you get a muddy brown or gray, but with light, combining all colors creates pure white light.

The best proof of sunlight being white comes from observing it in space. Astronauts who have seen the Sun from outside Earth's atmosphere consistently report that it appears as a brilliant white light source. Without our atmosphere to interfere, the Sun's true white color becomes clearly visible.

So why does the Sun look yellow from Earth? This happens because of a process called atmospheric scattering. As sunlight travels through our atmosphere, it encounters tiny particles and gas molecules. Blue light has a shorter wavelength and gets scattered more than other colors, making the sky appear blue. The remaining light that reaches our eyes has less blue in it, making the Sun appear more yellow or orange, especially when it's low on the horizon during sunrise or sunset.

You can demonstrate this white light composition at home using a simple prism. When you shine sunlight through a prism, it separates into all the colors of the rainbow - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. This separation proves that white sunlight contains all these colors mixed together. This phenomenon is also visible in natural rainbows, where water droplets act like tiny prisms, splitting sunlight into its component colors.