How does radiant energy reach Earth?
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Refer to an electromagnetic spectrum. \nRadiation is emission and propagation and emission of energy in the form of rays or waves (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=radiation).\nIn other words as long as waves travel there is radiation.\nThere are two types of radiation, the ionizing (harmful) radiation and the non-ionizing (not harmful) radiation.\nYou can see it in a magnetic spectrum. High frequency and low wavelength are those ionizing radiation. High wavelenth and low frequency are those non-ionizing radiation. Penetration of these waves are dependent on their frequencies. High frequencies are able to tranmsmit objects. \nFrom the magnetic spectrum there are different kinds of waves, (from ionizing to non-ionizing) radiowaves, microwaves, infrared, white light, UV, x-rays, gamma rays cosmic rays. These waves travel in a straight line unless scattered by hitting an object or being blocked or interrupted or you know I mean.\nThat's why astronomers detect radiowaves from the outerspace.\nSo if you asked, how does radiant energy reach earth, is simply because they travelled a striaght line from their source.
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Yes. Radiant energy strikes the matter surface it repel electrons from the matter and it release heat energy.
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The air is not warmed directly by the sun's rays, but by infrared, or long-wave radiation from the earth. The sun's rays strike the earth, and are absorbed by the earth, which raises the temperature of the earth. The earth reradiates the energy at a wavelength dependent on the temperature of the earth. The air is able to absorb the earth radiation, and becomes warmer. At high altitudes, as on mountain tops, strong winds keep the air mixed, and prevent much rise in temperatures near the surface of the mountain.\n\nAs you go up in altitude from the surface of the earth, the air cools at a fixed rate. This is called the "lapse rate," and for unsaturated air, that rate is about 5 deg. C. for each thousand feet of altitude. For saturated air, the rate is about 3.5 deg.C. for each thousand feet of altitude.
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A complex question that needs a highly simplified answer.\n\nA photon of light has different energy depending on the type of light, some light does go through us, but that ight is not visible to us.\n\nX-rays for example pass through things nicely, however they can be blocked sometimes by dense material (such as bone and metal), X-rays are a higher energy than visible light.\nEven higher energy is Gamma rays... a photon of this form of light can theoretically pass through several metres of lead, sometimes more.\n\nAt the other end of the spectrum is Infra red light, which is just outside our visibilty, when you feel it, it is heat. Consider that it can be easily insulated just by putting some sort of thick barrier between you and it.\nAlpha and beta radiation are such low energy that they are actually particles (fast travelling helium, and protons respectively). an alpha particle can be blocked by a thin piece of paper. A beta particle can be blocked by your skin.\n\nNow... visible light is between the extremes of theose above. As an experiment hold a torch to the palm of your hand and you can actually see light coming through. SO some light does get through. But most of it does not.\n\nVisible light is a happy medium with just enough energy for us to see. Any more energy or any less energy in the light and life would be difficult\n\nConside that if we could only see gamma rays then we would not see much at all, because the gamma rays would not bounce off anything.\nAt the other end, if we could only see beta particles then the world would be very dark because all the beta particles would be absorbed before they reached us.
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It's not a matter of great energy to travel a large distance. In a vacuum, there is nothing to stop objects. Once in motion, any object will keep going until some for acts on it. A photon(s) of light will travel untill someting absorbs it or reflects it or refracts it. Tissue paper DOES absorb light, depending on the intensity of the light, it will absorb all or a fraction of it. Pretty much anything physical absorbs light, even glass, though the absorption is very small for glass. Of course this is dependent on wavelength, some wavelenths are absorbed more than others and if you go to shorter wavelengths like x-rays, they pass right through the paper. Longer wavelenths like radio waves also pass right through.
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when its ready it just has to go somewhere. It takes the path of least resistance trying to equalize its energy. It usually goes to ground.
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It has to do with the path of the earth and the sun through space.\n\nThe websites I've attached should help.
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I remember this from college as being quite a long time, but I can't remember it exactly. This is from Wikipedia:\n\n"The high-energy photons (gamma and X-rays) released in fusion reactions take a long time to reach the Sun's surface, slowed down by the indirect path taken, as well as by constant absorption and reemission at lower energies in the solar mantle. Estimates of the "photon travel time" range from as much as 50 million years to as little as 17,000 years."
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The energy in the sun's core comes from fusing hydrogen into helium.  Most of the energy emerges in the form of high-speed particles and gamma rays, neither of which can go very far in the dense, hot plasma.  This energy moves by a process of conduction through the core, until it reaches less dense regions of the sun, where a process of convection moves the energy through the material.  \n\nOnly in the upper regions of the sun's surface does the density reach a point where the energy moves by the more familiar (to us) radiation.  The time for energy to go from the core of the sun to its surface is about a quarter of a million years.  \n\nThus, almost all the energy we see is a display of the activity in the Sun's core a quarter of a million years ago.  But there IS a way to jump the queue and see what is happening in the core.\n\nEvery fusion reaction in the Sun produces neutrinos, mass-less particles that barely interact with the surrounding matter.  These fly off unimpeded by the material around them, so, like the light from the photosphere, they move at the speed of light, and reach us eight minutes later after crossing the distance between us and the sun.\n\nIt takes a lot of effort to capture a neutrino, but they tell us a lot about what is happening in the core of the sun right now, while all we see on its surface is a sign of its remote past.  Since we're not finding as many neutrinos as we think we should, we're wondering if our knowledge of physics needs improving, or if the Sun is, in fact,a more variable star than we'd like to think.
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Heat energy from the sun travels through radiation, as opposed to convection and conduction.
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When heat radiates off the earth it causes the air right above the ground to heat up and then refract ( bend ) light so that light coming from the sky gets sent to our eyes like it was coming off the ground.  Drive down a highway in the summer.  Look off in the distance and it will appear that there is water on the ground.  This phenomenom (sp?) also happens in the dessert and can trick one into believing water is just a few hundred yards away.
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The enormous amount of energy continuously emitted by the sun is dispersed into outer space in all directions. Only a small fraction of this energy is intercepted by the earth and other solar planets. \nThe solar energy reaching the periphery of the earth's atmosphere is considered to be constant for all practical purposes, and is known as the solar constant. Because of the difficulty in achieving accurate measurements, the exact value of the solar constant is not known with certainty but is believed to be between 1,353 and 1,395 W/m2 (approximately 1.4 kW/m2, or 2.0 cal/cm2/min). The solar constant value is estimated on the basis of the solar radiation received on a unit area exposed perpendicularly to the rays of the sun at an average distance between the sun and the earth. \n\nIn passing through outer space, which is characterized by vacuum, the different types of solar energy remain intact and are not modified until the radiation reaches the top of the earth's atmosphere. In outer space, therefore, one would expect to encounter the types of radiation listed in Table 1, which are: gamma ray, X-ray, ultraviolet, and infrared radiations.
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Light is cool stuff.It acts like radiation but when it hits something it act like a particle.You cant see light until it hits something and it releases its energy.So most of the light after you turn the switch off hits something and ceases to be but a very small amount might be lucky to shine out to open sky and even less might leave earth.It will keep going till it hits something all happening at the speed of light.Like looking at very distant stars ,its taken billions of years for the light to reach us.The star is long gone switched off but we are still seeing the light from it very diffused but what we see hasn't hit anything on its journey and it's an infinitely small amount of what originally left that star/sun
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The Earth is in receivership of the energy of the Sun. No one thing such as a planet can generate Gravity. Gravity is the product of a transmitter (Sun), a receiver (Earth) and an object on or about the receiver. All planets rotate about the strongest electro-magnetic generator along a predictable plane. Electricity flows in a path of a helix as in $ our dollar sign. The helix is doubled and at the null or the point of crossing is where the dust accumulates and forms planets. Thus we are fixed within the boundaries established when the first two particles of dust magnetically aligned N & S and bonded. We are fixed in position therefore we can not be the hitter. We could be hit by a comet or other foriegn body that are in orbit by another cosmic energy beyond our solar system. Astroids that are dust fragments adrift as a result of other cosmic collisions. Particles adrift will be attracted by like elements which follow magntic trails of moving celestrial bodies in search of a home.
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In the morning/evening the sun rays are falling obliquely on to the earth, \nthereby passing through a thicker layer of the atmospheric air because of which (oblique incidence) a lot of its blue component is scattered off \n\nIts 1/lambda^4 scattering - smaller the lambda, larger is the energy scattered off/lost as compared to shorter path transversed during the day time \n\n[This is a standard class XII Physics question]
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Energy cannot be lost in a closed system, when there is strictly NO interference from outside sources.  So, energy can appear to be lost on Earth, as it is not a closed system, however looking at the Universe as a whole (which is most likely a closed system), any energy that appears to have been lost is still there.  Its just that the energy, whether as heat or light, can be "stretched" so much across the vastness of space, that it can appear to disappear.  \n\nSimilar to feeling the heat from a candle.  When you are close to it, the heat has only moved a small amount and is reasonably concentrated when it reaches you, however stand a lot further back and the heat disperses and you will notice that you can't feel the heat as well, if at all.
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Energy in the form of photons is generated in the sun's core. Photons like to take off at the speed of light, so they do. But they move only 1micron before running into(being absorbed by) a gas molecule. That's because the gas atoms at the center of the sun has a pressure of 250 billion times the earth atmosphere's sea level pressure. That is why gas atoms are so hard for photons to miss. But the gas atom gets so excited with the extra energy it carries from that hot photon that it lets go of another photon, that promptly runs into another gas atom. This emitting & absorption occurs 100 million trillion times PER YEAR.  You'd think all this elbowing going on that it would get to the sun's surface fairly quickly. But this radiative process takes from 30,000 to 200,000 years to make it only about 55% of the way to the sun's surface. But once it makes it to this higher convective layer of the sun(like the earth atmosphere's lower convective atmosphere), then the energy is transported fairly quickly to the sun's surface.