what makes the sun yellow?

Answer 1

It is actually reddish orange . It is becuase of all the burning fire that causes that color . If it wasn't for the great burning fire it wouldn't have been reddish orange or it wouldn't be a sun niether a star . If no sun , no day . No day , no earth . No earth , no mankind . So thank the fire .

Answer 2

It's a little funny we can explain an "Einstein iron cross" as four views of a galaxy 8 billion light years away but the color of a star 8 light minutes away ...well that's another matter.

There was an interesting article on this in Astronomy earlier this year. The author, as I recall, claimed the sun was greenish (outside our atmosphere). If you want, I'll dig it up.

The atmosphere must play a crticial role in the color we perceive as it is white at noon, then yellow, orange and redish.

The sun appears to me to peak around 450 nm - Blue. Here, I hope, is the Sun's light curve >>> Graph <<<.

Others say it is more the sumation of all the wavelengths that gives the final color appearance. This, of course, is tied to our eye's reception. BTW thanks for that link Visitor.

Since the Sun is so bright in space, it is not seen as anything other than white as far as I know. Color cones are overmodulated with the Suns light. (Not the best word to describe it but I just like saying it.)

There ought to be some way to take solar data, lower the intesity so the color cones are not flooded (overmodulated) and "see" how it looks. Or how about a distant satelite near Jupiter taking a quick look in the visual spectrum....oops too late. But, maybe Galileo did. Anyone know?

Answer 3

I have to cop out here. It's not really well-known why. Some people think the blue sky is to blame. If blue light is being scattered out of the direct sunlight hitting our eyes, the resulting color should look yellowish. While it's true that some blue light is scattered away, not enough of it is scattered to make the Sun very yellow. Even though a lot of blue photons are scattered away from the Sun to make the sky look blue, it's only a fraction of the total blue photons from the Sun. Most of them come straight to your eye, unimpeded by air molecules. So the relatively small number of photons making the sky blue doesn't really affect the intrinsic color of the Sun enough to notice.

Another common idea is that the Sun looks yellow because we are comparing it to the blue sky. Studies have shown that we perceive color not just because of the intrinsic properties of the light but also by comparing that color to some other color we see at the same time. In other words, a yellow light may look even yellower if seen against a background of blue. However, if this is why we see the Sun as yellow, clouds would look yellow, too, so this can't be right either.

There is another possibility. When the Sun is up high, you can never look directly at it. It's too bright. Your eyes automatically flinch and water up, making it hard to see straight. You can only see the Sun from the corner of your eye. Under those conditions it's not surprising that the colors may get a little distorted.

Answer 4

If you could see the Sun from space it would look white. We see it through an atmosphere polluted with billions of tiny particles. Some of these particles are just the right size to scatter blue light in all directions (making the sky blue), and let the other end of the spectrum through without scattering. White minus blue = yellow. That's why the Sun looks yellow.

The more atmosphere the light has to travel through, the greater the effect.That's why the Sun can look very yellow, or even orange or red, at sunset.

For a practical demonstration of this effect, shine a light on some cigarette smoke (if you can find anyone foolish enough to smoke).

Look at the smoke from the same side as the light: it looks blue because it is scattering mostly blue light into your eyes.

Now look at the light through the smoke: it looks yellow because some of its blue light has been scattered backwards and never gets to your eyes.

Fires on Earth are yellow for a different reason. Their light is yellow to begin with, because they are not nearly as hot as the Sun, and cooler things give out yellower light.

Answer 5

The Sun "burns" hydrogen (actually, it is nuclear fusion). The temperature at the exterior is about 6000 Kelvin. Everything below the "surface" absorbs all radiation falling on it, and therefore behaves as a "black body"

As such, it emits radiation in all colors, but with a peak in yellow. If you were able to heat a piece of material at that temperature it will have the same color. Look, for example, at the heater element of an electric stove set at maximum.

One note: a piece of iron, for example, heated at high temperature, will appear white. This is due to the fact that the maximum is wide, it does not cover only the yellow color, and at high intensity, any color (even pure colors) appear white (it is a physiological effect).

Answer 6

The reason is, is that all light travels in way lengths, and different wavelengths have different colors, Longer Waves are more red while shorter waves are more blue, the reason the sun looks yellow is because it is sending out wavelengths of a certain length that happen to be about the same lenght as yellow light.

Answer 7

Actually if u see the sun from space, its white in colour..
As the light from the sun enters the atmosphere, some of the shorter wavelength light (the blues and violets) are removed from the direct rays of the sun by scattering. The remaining colors together appear yellow. Hope i clarified your doubt..

Answer 8

It isn't, really. The color yellow is a purely human interpretation of a collection of radiation that hits the retinae of our eyes and gets processed by our visual cortex.

Animals seem to have some analogous way of discriminating light by some kind of 'coloration' sense, but we have no way to know if their brains actually 'see' the same thing we do when they look at 'yellow' light. Color detection is caused by photosensitive cells called 'cones', and some animals have none of these and would see the Sun as, presumably some shade of grey since there retinae have the black-white sensitive 'rods' instead, and which have a greater light sensitivity.

Answer 9

In my humble opinion, the Sun is yellow because it is a "G" class star, like Capella, with dominating H+ and Ca++ lines in their spectrum... the Sun is supposed to come to an end like red giant, after 5 billion years. However the color of a star is due to its cromosphere.

Answer 10

The sun only APPEARS yellow to us because of how we perceive color with our eyes. The Sun's photosphere radiates at a temperature of about 6000 K, which means that most of its radiance is in our visible spectrum, and when filtered by the Earth's atmosphere, it appears yellow (unless it's low on the horizon, in which case it appears red because of the greater thickness of atmosphere the light has to penetrate to get to your eyes).