Explain the discrepancy between the suns yellow (G) classification and the loads of white light it gives out.?

Question

Rainbows, blue sky etc are the product of broken white light. The sun does have a yellowish twinge though. Would rainbows look different if the sun was pure white?

Answer 1

Technically, there is no such thing as pure white light. White light is a mixture of multiple spectrums of light. As an example, find a dark room with a regular light bulb and a florescent. Try turning each one on one at a time and notice the color difference. The yellow is because there is a yellow tinge to the surface of the sun. There is a table of information on the website below
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_classification

Answer 2

Ever notice that the sun looks more red at sunset? part of the reason that the sun looks yellow (and sometimes red) is because as the light comes into our atmosphere it is refracted (hence the blue sky). The ways to know that the sun produces white light is a, the rainbow, which you already know, b, White objects. the moon is white and the sun's light shows that, during the night when there isn't too much light caught in the atmosphere.

Answer 3

Saying that the Sun is a yellow star just means that it is brightest in the yellow part of the spectrum. It gives off light all across the visible spectrum, though. And that is all that white light is - a mixture of all the visible colors. You can see all those colors in the rainbow because they are there in the sunlight for the raindrops to reflect.

Also, unless the light is strongly colored, we tend to see any light as white. Incandescent lights are rather orange compared to sunlight, but when you turn on the lights at night they look white.

Answer 4

The moon is actually darn near black, with an albedo about the same as new asphalt. The sun's peak emission in photon count is actually *green*. If you don't believe me, check out this link:
Solar spectrum: http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/MSD-full-spectrum-solar-cell.html

Now that is photon count. If you go by energy output on the left scale, the peak shifts even more clearly to the green.

So, why does its light look white? Try wearing red tinted glasses for a long time and then taking them off. Everything looks extra blue in part because your brain is compensating and defining a new "white". Sunlight looks white because white is more of a state of perception than anything physically meaningful.

(You might argue that white paper is white all the time, but I disagree. It depends on what color light you are shining on it!! Oh, and it isn't refraction that makes the sun look red at sunset! It is called Rayleigh scattering. )

Answer 5

Yellow is the predominant color in the Sun's light, but it does contain all of the colors, along with higher Electro-Magnetic radiation.

Incidentally, our eyes are the most senstive to yellow and green, because that is the Sun's predominant color. That is why they went to yellow and green colored fire trucks at one time.

Answer 6

All the spectral colours are there. The yellow is relatively the strongest radiation.