from newatlas.com
We all know that water evaporates when the temperature climbs, but researchers have just shown that there’s another factor at play. The breakthrough could solve long-standing atmospheric mysteries and lead to future technological advances.
What the MIT team discovered is that light in the visible spectrum is enough to knock water molecules loose at the surface where it meets air and send them floating away. In other words, while it’s true that evaporation has been happening all of these years due to fluctuations in temperature, water has also been turning to vapor from the force of light beams alone.
The scientists have termed the process the “photomolecular effect” after the photoelectric effect that was explained by Einstein in 1905, in which particles of light could free electrons from atoms in the material they strike.
“The finding of evaporation caused by light instead of heat provides new disruptive knowledge of light-water interaction,” says Xiulin Ruan, professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University. Ruan was not involved in the MIT study, which has been published in the journal PNAS.
“It could help us gain new understanding of how sunlight interacts with cloud, fog, oceans, and other natural water bodies to affect weather and climate,” he added. “It has significant potential practical applications such as high-performance water desalination driven by solar energy. This research is among the rare group of truly revolutionary discoveries which are not widely accepted by the community right away but take time, sometimes a long time, to be confirmed.”
MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology ?
Yes