Wonders of the Universe - Brian Cox [41]
Kirchhoff and Bunsen’s discovery was purely empirical – they had observed that when gases are heated on Earth they do not simply glow like a piece of hot metal, they give off light of very specific colours – and interestingly those colours depend only on the chemical composition of the gas and not on the temperature. In particular, each chemical element gives off its own unique set of colours. The element strontium, for example, burns with a beautiful red colour, sodium with a deep yellow, and copper is a haunting emerald green.
The two German scientists also noticed that the missing black lines in the solar spectrum corresponded exactly to the glowing colours of the elements. There are, for example, two black lines in the yellow part of the Sun’s light that correspond exactly to the two distinct yellow emission lines of hot sodium vapour. You will be familiar with this mixture of two very slightly different yellows – it is the colour of sodium streetlights.
Interestingly, Kirchhoff and Bunsen had no idea why the elements behaved in this way, but this didn’t matter if all you wanted to do was to match the signatures of elements observed on Earth with the signatures in the light from the Sun and stars. It wasn’t until the turn of the twentieth century that an explanation for this strange behaviour of the elements was discovered. The answer lies in quantum mechanics, and the spectrographic work of physicists and chemists such as Kirchhoff and Bunsen was a major motivating factor in the development of the quantum theory. Elements emit and absorb light when the electrons surrounding their atomic nuclei jump around. The key insight that led to quantum theory was that electrons can’t exist anywhere around a nucleus like planets around a star, but they are instead placed in specific, very restrictive ‘orbits’. The deep reason for this is that electrons do not always behave as point-like particles of matter. They also exhibit wave-like properties, and this severely restricts the ways in which they can be confined around the atomic nucleus. What happens at a microscopic level when an atom absorbs some light is that an electron jumps to a different, more energetic, orbit and it emits light when the electron falls back from a higher to a lower energy orbit. The difference in energy between the lower orbit and the higher orbit must correspond exactly to the energy of the light absorbed or emitted.
In the early nineteenth century, German scientist Joseph von Fraunhofer documented the existence of 574 dark lines within the solar spectrum. This diagram is a visual representation of these Fraunhofer lines.
Spectographic investigations have revealed that Sirius, the dog star, is metal-heavy, with an iron content three times that of the Sun.
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Isn’t it simply wonderful that just by looking at the light from those twinkling stars we can tell what those fiery worlds, so far away, are made of?
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Although Polaris, the pole star (top and middle), is 430 light years away, we know by looking that is has about the same heavy element abundance as our sun, but markedly less carbon and a lot more nitrogen. Vega (bottom), meanwhile, as the second-brightest star in the northern sky, consists of only about a third of the amount of metals as our sun.
However, quantum theory also stipulates that light should not always be thought of as a wave. Just like electrons, light can behave as both a wave and a stream of particles. These particles are called photons. Now, here is the key point: photons of a particular energy correspond to a particular colour of light, so red photons have a lower energy than yellow photons, which have a lower energy than blue photons. Since each element has electrons