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That's just science (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 37 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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.

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  • [–] 3 points 13 hours ago (1 child)

    with a slight bias towards green

    And it's my understanding THATS why plants are green

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  • [–] 3 points 5 hours ago (1 child)

    Actually, leaves look green because they don't absorb green light (that's why grow bulbs are red & blue)

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  • [–] 1 point 46 minutes 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

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  • [–] 46 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 hours ago* (1 child)

    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 see them

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  • [–] 1 point 59 minutes 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.

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