Blackbody Radiation - Cobequid Educational Centre黑体辐射Cobequid教育中心.pptVIP

Blackbody Radiation What is a blackbody? A blackbody is a hypothetical body consisting of a sufficient number of molecules absorbing and emitting electromagnetic radiation in all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum so that: all incident radiation is completely absorbed in all wavelengths bands and in all directions maximum possible emission is realized Are the Earth and Sun blackbodies? Although a blackbody does not really exist, we will consider the planets and stars (including the earth and the sun) as blackbodies. Even though by definition, they are not perfect blackbodies, for the sake of understanding and simplicity we can apply the characteristics of blackbodies to them. According to the above definition, a blackbody will emit radiation in all parts of the EM spectrum, but by intuition, we know that one will not radiate in all wavelengths equally. So the first thing we would like to know about blackbody radiation is in what wavelengths is radiation emitted primarily. Secondly, we know that all blackbodies do not radiate energy at the same rate, certainly shown by the suns power compared to that of the earth. Therefore, it would be beneficial to know something about the rate of blackbody emission. Fortunately for us, we can answer both questions knowing only one characteristic of an object -- temperature. Stefan-Boltzmanns Law  Stefan-Boltzmanns law states that the rate that a body emits radiation (per unit area) is directly proportional to the bodys absolute temperature to the fourth power. With this fact we can determine that the sun radiates 160,000 times more energy than the earth. In fact we receive only 1/2 billion of the suns total energy. This is enough however to light New York City street lights for 2 days by collecting light for twelve hours on one football field! Wiens Displacement Law Wiens displacement law says that the wavelength of the maximum emitted radiation is inversely proportional to the absolute (°K) temperature. If we plug in t