Relationship between color of stars and their heat intensitiy

[dreamfrost]

can someone help me??
i have been having an argument with my cousin about which color stars produce more heat?
i say that blue stars produce more heat!
but my cousin says that white stars produce more heat!
can someone please tell me if I'm right or if she is right?

 

[futz]

Blue stars are hotter.

The hotter an object is, the higher energy it has - higher energies correspond to higher frequencies, which in turn means shorter wavelengths. Blue is on one end of the visible spectrum (short wavelength) and red is on the other (long wavelength). So, blue is hotter than red.

You can think of white as been a combination of different colors between red and blue; consequently white stars are cooler than blue.

 

[russ_watters]

Hot objects give of electromagnetic radiation. AKA light (at least the part of the spectrum we can see). If you've passed about 8th grade and you paid attention, you know the spectrum, the colors of the rainbow:
Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Indigo
Violet

Now the colors will mix together and a hot object produces a complete spectrum, but it will tend to lean in one direction or the other depending on temperature as futz said. A red star isn't producing much of any other color. A blue star is producing a lot of the other colors, just a lot more blue.

 

[dreamfrost]

thank you for all of your help.
i have now angered my cousin and i am somewhat happy about it.
again thank you very much!

 

[Phobos]

One of the many benefits of PF!

 

[Mushu55]

About the white light... sorry to disappoint you, but as I know the white light disperses into the spectrum of colours...and has smaller wavelength than ultraviolet light. You can check it out by yourself. Increasing the temperature of an object makes it light red, then orange... etc heading to smaller wavelengths. When the object reaches 1500 Celsius degrees it lights intensively white i.e. it results in a continuous spectrum starting from infrared light and finishing with ultraviolet.
So white stars are hotter than blue because they have smaller wavelenght and higher frequency.

 

[russ_watters]

That's wrong, but more important, this thread is 8 years old, so that's kinda pointless. Thread locked.