Starting off, what type of simple chemical reaction occurs in fireworks ?  To make fireworks explode, there are actually several chemical reactions that occur including –oxidation, reduction, and incandescence.  To put it in simple terms, the fireworks burn, explode, and come out with impressive colors.

Redox Reaction

What you see and what you hear during fireworks display are the result of chemical reactions – oxidation and reduction. You can also call it as the redox reaction. The oxidation reaction is the oxygen being produced. Oxidizers produce the oxygen needed to burn the reducing agents causing excitement to the compounds to emit light. Some basic oxidizers found in fireworks are chlorates, nitrates, and perchlorates. Oxidation-reduction reaction occurs in all fireworks explosions. Sulfur and carbon are some of the reducing agents which combine with the oxygen from the oxidizers to promote the energy of explosion.

Gun powder or black powder which is made up of 75% potassium nitrate, 15% charcoal, and 10% sulfur is a major component of fireworks, and burning gun powder causes the redox reaction.

Incandescence

Incandescence, on the other hand, is a much basic and easy chemical reaction. This reaction takes place when an object gets hot, and then it changes and emits off light. Particles from the fireworks when heated to high temperatures emit radiation. Incandescence is responsible for the white colors, and a bit of blue which people often see in fireworks.

To achieve a much brighter color, it takes a small increase in temperature. Magnesium and other reactive metals produce flares of white light. You can also achieve this when aluminum and perchlorate explode. Charcoal and iron particles result in emission of gold colored sparks.

Colors

So how do fireworks manufacturer achieve those striking colors once the fireworks are lit up? Remember that inside a firework, there are gunpowder/ black powder and stars where metal salts are put. The stars are responsible for the production of the colors, as well as the bright light in the fireworks. The colors are produced by the oxidation-reduction reaction. Below is the combination of metals and salts to produce different colors of the fireworks:

• Red: strontium and lithium salts
• Orange: calcium salts
• Yellow: sodium compounds
• Gold: iron and charcoal
• Green: barium and chlorine
• Purple: copper and strontium
• Blue: copper and chlorine

The stars, when ignited, produce the light and sound effects. Starting from the lift-off to color release, the manufacturers have cautiously planned a sequence of events to take place.

Now, whenever someone asks you what kind of chemical reaction occurs in fireworks, you’ll be confident enough to answer their questions.  Hope this article has helped you.

Tomato Battery Powering One LED and a Buzzer

Just wanna share about this one nice article i just read from elperfecto.com about this tomato battery.

I was amazed about this tomato battery that can power up the LED and buzzer.  When i was in high-school, i remember we did an experiment about lemon batt.  powering a small calculator.  We had about approximately 10 lemons to power up the small calculator.  Lemon is the commonly used fruit in the science project to make a batt. and not a t0mat0.  So i was amazed to see this one t0mat0 powering a LED and a buzzer.  The t0mat0 batt. only uses two metals: zinc and copper dipped in mashed t0mat0. The t0mat0 batt. in the video was able to  give about 3.5 volts enough to power up the LED and the buzzer.  According to the author,  “Acid can release electricity from metal” and one good source of acid except from the lemon is the t0mat0.  Watch the video below to see the t0mat0 battery at work.

It is estimated that the asteroid that smashed into Earth that caused Dinosaurs extinction was 40 Km in diameter

Asteroid impact is one of scientist’s theory about dinosaur  extinction. You probably heard about this many times and maybe you are wondering if that was the asteroid that hit the Northern Arizona and left a crater as big as a football stadium.  That’s because that was the biggest and the most popular crater that i read from encyclopedia and so i thought that it was the meteor that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. if you think it was that asteroid just like i was thinking before, then you’re wrong.  It’s still small for it to kill all of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and that crater in Arizona was just created about 40,000 years ago by a nickel-iron meteorite about 50 meters accross.  Many times smaller than what researchers recently found !!!

So, if you’re wondering where that bigger asteroid crashed that caused dinosaur extinction can be found, Well, Sankar Chatterjee and team of researcher have been looking at something known as the Shiva crater. This is located  beneath the Indian Ocean, west of Mumbai, India.  The size of the crater  is  approximately 600 kilometers long by 400 km wide and estimated to  be around 65 million years old which is believed to be the time of the death of the dinosaurs.  Chatterjee believes that this is the largest crater known on Earth and would have been made by an asteroid or comet  approximately 40 Kilometer in diameter!!!  The size is astounding.  Imagine a rock that huge travelling at the speed faster than sound smashed into earth.  It must have resulted in a great earthquake and huge tsunamis.  But this was not the caused of dinosaurs’ extinction.  Keep reading…

Three-dimensional reconstruction of the submerged Shiva crater (~500 km diameter) at the Mumbai Offshore Basin, western shelf of India from different cross-sectional and geophysical data. The overlying 4.3-mile-tick Cenozoic strata and water column were removed to show the morphology of the crater. Credit: S. Chatterjee.

if we look on the photo we can see an underwater mountain called Bombay high which is as tall as McKinley (5K) surrounded by Shiva’s crater.  According to Chaterjee the asteroid impact is powerful enough that caused magma to well up and create the mountain rapidly upward. The asteroid impact also caused the Indian subcontinent to break off and drift toward Africa, now known as the Seychelles islands.

Chaterjee and team of researcher found rich deposits of shocked quarts and iridium that can be found more commonly at asteroid impact sites. Chaterjee suggests that the impact may have enhanced volcanic eruptions altering the climate and hastening dinosaur’s extinction.