The human eye can see 'invisible' infrared light

Any science textbook will tell you we can't see infrared light. Like X-rays and radio waves, infrared light waves are outside the visual spectrum. But an international team of researchers co-led by scientists at Washington ...

Stunning new Hubble images reveal stars gone haywire

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope demonstrates its full range of imaging capabilities with two new images of planetary nebulae. The images depict two nearby young planetary nebulae, NGC 6302, dubbed the Butterfly Nebula, ...

Researchers turn light upside down

Researchers from CIC nanoGUNE (San Sebastian, Spain) and collaborators have reported in Science the development of a so-called hyperbolic metasurface on which light propagates with completely reshaped wafefronts. This scientific ...

Hubble finds far-away planet vanishing at record speed

The speed and distance at which planets orbit their respective blazing stars can determine each planet's fate—whether the planet remains a longstanding part of its solar system or evaporates into the universe's dark graveyard ...

page 1 from 40

Infrared

Infrared (IR) radiation is electromagnetic radiation whose wavelength is longer than that of visible light (400-700 nm), but shorter than that of terahertz radiation (100 µm - 1 mm) and microwaves (~30,000 µm). Infrared radiation spans roughly three orders of magnitude (750 nm and 100 µm).

Direct sunlight has a luminous efficacy of about 93 lumens per watt of radiant flux, which includes infrared (47% share of the spectrum), visible (46%), and ultra-violet (only 6%) light. Bright sunlight provides luminance of approximately 100,000 candela per square meter at the Earth's surface.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA