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Black Body
Black Body
Black Body
4/24/14, 7:19 PM
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4/24/14, 7:19 PM
there.
Because you get different curves depending
how warm
the object is.
Ss the object,
gets warmer, the peak energy, which is
where the intensity is the strongest,
shifts in this direction, toward shorter
wavelength, or higher wave number,
more energetic light.
So you probably have known this before by
thinking about the idea of red hot and white
hot.
An object just at room temperature
is shining light.
But it's all in the infrared, so we can't
see it
with our eyes that can only see in the
visible range.
But as the object gets hotter and hotter,
the tail starts to encroach in the
visible range, and
you start to see some red color there.
And then if it gets really hot, it can
fill up the whole visible range, and that's
when something gets white-hot.
White hot is much hotter than red hot.
You already sort of knew that, right?
The other thing about this
spectrum is that it gets much bigger as
you get hotter.
And it turns out that there's a formula
describing this.
It's right here.
The total energy in watts per square meter
is given by these three terms.
The first is Epsilon which i'll explain
next.
the second is the StefanBoltzmann
constant which
is just a constant number you can
look up in a book, it never changes.
And then third, is the Temperature in
Kelvins raised to the fourth power.
So you raise it to the fourth power.
That means if you double the temperature,
the energy flux goes up by a factor of
two to the fourth, which is 16, so
it's a very, very powerful function of
temperature.
So, back to this term now, Epsilon.
This relates to
whether the object is what they
call a black body or not.
if an object is a black body, it's as
though
it's a musical instrument that has all of
the notes.
Like a piano that has all the keys, if
you
just hit it with a big hammer
or something.
Make all of the keys vibrate at once.
You'll get this big wall of sound like
this.
But if you have a piano that's missing a
bunch of strings in the middle and you do
the same thing, you'll get some low notes
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4/24/14, 7:19 PM
and
you'll get some high notes but there will
be some
missing stuff in the middle.
So this is what a physicist
would call a black body.
Because it makes a smooth black body curve
like this.
And the Epsilon value for this would be
one.
So you'd put in number one here.
And there's no units to Epsilon it can go
to zero if an object had none of these
oscillators,
and couldn't make any infrared light at
all,
to one, if it had all of the notes and
could make all the different frequencies.
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