Light is the reason behind how we see the world! Let’s discover five legendary light facts for kids.
Light is made up of all the colours mixed together to create white light. White light can be split up into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. A prism is an object that can break up white light to show the different colours that it’s made up of. Isaac Newton discovered that light was made up of lots of different colours.
Did you know the object you are looking at might not actually be the colour of the object. Things appear a certain colour because it’s the only colour that is reflected. Certain objects absorb certain colours of light, the colour you are seeing is the colour that has been reflected.
For example, a blue bike is blue because it absorbs all other colours except blue, which gets reflected instead. This is also the same reason why plants are green. Black objects absorb all colours and white objects reflect all colours.
Light waves bend when their speed is affected. Certain materials can cause light to travel slower or faster. For example, water and glass are two materials that make light travel slower than when it travels through the air. Have you ever looked at an object underwater? Sometimes objects underwater can look bent, this is because light waves bend when going through the water.
Light travels faster than anything else in the universe. In a vacuum, it travels at a speed of 300,000 km per second. It only takes light 1.255 seconds to get to the Earth from the Moon, whereas it takes over 8 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth. This means that the light we see from the sun actually left the Sun 8 minutes ago.
Plants convert the sunlight into energy to make their food. The process is called “photosynthesis”. Chlorophyll is a green pigment found in the chloroplast plants. Chlorophyll gives plants their green colour and helps them absorb energy and light from the sun. It converts light energy into chemical energy which the plant can then use. Without sunlight, plants cannot survive.
Certain animals can see colours that we can’t even imagine. Some insects such as butterflies and bees and mammals such as reindeers can see ultraviolet light or UV light. This light is invisible to the human eye. On the other hand, some animals see less colours than humans. Dogs and cats see fewer and less vibrant colours than humans.
We hope you enjoyed learning more things about light as much as we loved teaching you about it. Now that you know how majestic the light is, you can move on to learn more about STEM like: Forces, Gravity and Friction.
Why not subscribe to our LearningMole Library for as little as £1.99 per month to access over 3000 fun educational videos.
Leave a Reply