What is the color of the sun?
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The color of the sun is white. The sun emits all colors of the rainbow in approximately equal amounts and we call this combination white. That is w...

I thought that the frequency of light was directly inverse to the wavelength by a constant. In other words, I assumed that graphing the frequency of light as a function of wavelength would be a straight inverse line. Because of that, the graphs for the distribution of light from the sun as functions of frequency and wavelength would be exactly the same, but reversed. Yet, this is not what is reported in the linked article. Even more confusing to me is that the different functions peak at different light. When as a function of frequency, the light peaks at infrared. When as a function of wavelength, the light peaks at violet.

What am I misunderstanding? Is the frequency of light not directly proportional to it’s wavelength? Or is this something to do with the way we are measuring the light from the Sun?

  • @GlowHuddy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9•1 year ago

    The frequency is not directly proportional to the wavelength - it’s inversely proportional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(mathematics)#Inverse_proportionality

    Think of this as this: The wavelength is the distance that light travels during one wave i.e. cycle. Light propagates with the speed of light, so the smaller the wavelength, it means the frequency must increase. If the wavelength gets two times lower, the frequency increases two times. If wavelength approaches 0, then frequency starts growing very quickly, approaching infinity.

    The plot is not a straight line but a hyperbola.

    • BOMBSOPEnglish
      8•1 year ago

      Interesting. Sparked by your comment, I found this.

      What’s the maximun frequency of light?

      Approximately 2 x 10^43 Hz is the “Planck frequency” (the inverse of the Planck time). At that frequency, individual photons (or any other particle with this much energy) would be black holes (their Compton wavelength would be smaller than their Schwartzchild radius), and so until someone comes up with a theory of light which includes virtual black-holes, photons with a frequency above this cannot be considered sensible.

      • @bitcrafter@programming.devEnglish
        3•1 year ago

        I think that answer is a touch misleading because it makes it sound like this is a fundamental physical limit, when really it’s just the scale where our current theories break down and give nonsense results, so we don’t really know what is going on at that scale yet.