believe it or not this has spurned an interest that I
now need to explore.
No worries his biography gives a brief outline of him.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1918/planck-bio.htmlYou will see he was lead to the problem you are dealing with when he was studying radiation. The question of why is the suns spectrum broad and smooth.
He formalized your vibrations into a resonant element and when you do so the energy exchanges can only be in discrete packet or quanta.
revolutionary idea that the energy emitted by a resonator could only take on discrete values or quanta. The energy for a resonator of frequency v is hv where h is a universal constant, now called Planck's constant.
So when your vibrating molecules try to unload their kinetic energy they can only do so in discrete packets and that is the origin of photons but having a broad frequency range representing the broad range of kinetic energies in the molecules.
In effect old blacksmiths already knew this because they had worked white hot metal and the composition of the metal didn't change the color it always has the same distinctive color.
This is the emission curve you get using the theory for different temperatures 5000K, 4000K, 3000K
So heat any material to 5000K and you get visible light and that explains the incandescent light bulb.
When you look at molten lava you can tell the temperature just by looking at the color you don't have to know the composition at all.
Compare your suns emission graph to the 5000K curve developed by Max from theory
Here lets make in simple and put on the same post:
Shame I can't get them scaled the same ... but do you see the two graphs match (your image has the 5250 deg C planck graph in black). I can tell the sun is around 5000K in temperature just from the graph. What I don't have is a clue what the sun is made of that requires a different technique and different data. Our theory says it doesn't matter what the material is the heat of 5000K will produce that curve.
So Max was the first person that could explain that emission curve of the sun and it's profound implications. Yes he was religious and we don't hold that against him. His spiritual vibrations are the foundations of QM.
Anyhow that is the scientific origin of that emission curve for the sun, which I and almost all scientists believe. I think Bill G believes something else but he can argue that.
