The fires of recent weeks in Spain have produced images that are really rare to see during the course of the year. Under the mantle of the flames, the red Sun that accompanied the fire in Navalacruz was the result of a phenomenon that does not occur every day and that is very characteristic when large fires occur.
The ash cloud from the Navalacruz fire covered the sky from 150 kilometers away from the epicenter of the flames . This fire was accompanied by this red Sun.
Why does this phenomenon occur?
As expected, the fire was the main cause that the color of the Sun was red. With almost an intense and long-lasting sunset, the dispersion of the particles through the atmosphere makes the sky redder and the Sun turns red. The more particles are suspended in the sky, the more intense the phenomenon.
The intensity and intensity of this phenomenon largely depends on the number of particles that are released into the air. Environmental phenomena such as pollution, or the ashes of a fire, cause the Sun to appear red and appear to change color during the day, since this dust influences the hue that we see the Sun from the Earth.
Rayleigh scattering
To know a bit what this phenomenon is due to, we must know what Rayleigh scattering is. It was Baron John William Scott, known as Lord Rayleigh, who first explained the phenomenon in 1971. He was a physicist and university professor who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1904.
According to his observation, he defined the phenomenon as follows: “the scattering of visible light or any other electromagnetic radiation by particles whose size is much smaller than the wavelength of the scattered photons.”
This phenomenon is the cause that we see that color of the sky and that red Sun as explained in the Research and Science magazine: «The intensity of the light scattered by these particles is proportional to the inverse of the fourth power of the wavelength of light: therefore, the shorter the wavelength, the more the radiation will be scattered. ‘
The density of smoke, ashes, flames, fire, and the concentration of pollution accumulated in our sky, make this phenomenon possible, which dyes the sky with a really beautiful, reddish color, and the red Sun becomes an event. .
