The Energy of the Sun

Heat and Light as Companions:
It is difficult to tell how much of the energy of the sun is light and how much is heat, but it is easy to determine the combined effect of heat and light.

Suppose we allow the sun's rays to fall perpendicularly upon a metal cylinder coated with lampblack and filled with a known quantity of water; at the expiration of a few hours the temperature of the water will be considerably higher. Lampblack is a good absorber of heat, and it is used as a coating in order that all the light rays which fall upon the cylinder may be absorbed and none lost by reflection.

Light and heat rays fall upon the lampblack, pass through the cylinder, and heat the water. We know that the red light rays have the largest share toward heating the water, because if the cylinder is surrounded by blue glass which absorbs the red rays and prevents their passage into the water, the temperature of the water begins to fall. That the other light rays have a small share would have been clear from the preceding Section.

All the energy of the sunshine which falls upon the cylinder, both as heat and as light, is absorbed in the form of heat, and the total amount of this energy can be calculated from the increase in the temperature of the water. The energy which heated the water would have passed onward to the surface of the earth if its path had not been obstructed by the cylinder of water; and we can be sure that the energy which entered the water and changed its temperature would ordinarily have heated an equal area of the earth's surface; and from this, we can calculate the energy falling upon the entire surface of the earth during any one day.

Computations based upon this experiment show that the earth receives daily from the sun the equivalent of 341,000,000,000 horse power - an amount inconceivable to the human mind.

Professor Young gives a striking picture of what this energy of the sun could do. A solid column of ice 93,000,000 miles long and 2-1/4 miles in diameter could be melted in a single second if the sun could concentrate its entire power on the ice.

While the amount of energy received daily from the sun by the earth is actually enormous, it is small in comparison with the whole amount given out by the sun to the numerous heavenly bodies which make up the universe. In fact, of the entire outflow of heat and light, the earth receives only one part in two thousand million, and this is a very small portion indeed.

FIG. - The energy of the sun can be measured in heat units.