White Hot

The Gnome

Bit of an odd question but what is there a "colour" after whit hot? Or is white as hot as it gets colourwise?

dudara

White hot is as hot as things get, in terms of visible light.

It you begin to heat something, it glows red after a while. The long wavelength of red means that it has a low frequency and hence less energy is required to glow red.

As it heats up some more, colours such as orange, yellow, green etc begin to appear because there is now sufficient energy. however we don't see that because they all blend together to create white light.

Capt'n Midnight

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bbs.jpgFrom the diagram you can see as the termperature rises more of the radiation is in shorter wavelengths. [edit - ignore the colours of the lines look at the temperatures instead 5500K = 5,227 Centigrade ]

So as the temperature rises the colour changes, past white and on to blue.
As an example the hottest starts are blue. http://www.le.ac.uk/physics/faulkes/web/images/hrcolour.jpg (50KB)

The Gnome

Excellent, thanks for the info guys.