From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um.

Answering those questions that make you go. Um, um, um, um, um, moment of um,

moment of um, um, um,

Moment of Um, comes to you from APM studios.

I'm Ruby Guthrie.

Um, picture this.

It's a beautiful summer's day. The sun is out and not a cloud in the sky.

But it is hot! I'm talking sweat tea. And you know what's making it even sweatier? The fact that I'm wearing a black t-shirt. Big mistake. Huge! Have you ever noticed that?

Whether it's a shirt, the inside of the car, or even your adorable black cat, why do darker things seem to absorb more heat?

Our listener, Oscar, was wondering the same thing.

My name is Oscar. I'm from Snowish, Washington and I want to know why black absorbs heat. Why does black absorb heat? Well, first we have to understand what black is, and there are two ways to think about black.

One is that black is the absence of light. Light is energy,

which means that it's a wave that carries energy from one place to another. And you can have the blackness of space, let's say,

which means that there's no light there, which means that it's actually not observing any heat. But if you have an object that is black, well that actually does absorb heat.

Ola, my name is Dr. Desiree Whitmore. I'm also known as the Laser Chick and I work at the Exploratorium in San Francisco as a staff scientist.

When light interacts with an object, it can do three different things. It can either be reflected, it can be

transmitted, or it can be absorbed. Now if we see objects that have color to them what what we are actually seeing is light interacting with objects.

And oftentimes what happens is more than one of these three processes can happen at the same time.

So for example, when you're outside and you look at a tree,

and so you see a red apple in a green tree,

what you're actually seeing is the light coming from the sun,

which is actually white, which means that it's made up of all of the colors.

...