Why Is Grass Green?
Why Is Grass Green? The green color in grass-and in most other plants-comes from chloroplast within the cells, each of which contains four different colors or pigments.
These are: chlorophyll (a), which is the strongest and is blue-green; chlorophyll (b), which is yellow-green; xantophyll, which is yellow; and carotene, which is orange and gives carrots their bright color.
Grass goes from light green in early spring to dark green and brown in summer and autumn because the amount of each pigment changes, like the paint on a palette, to mix new colors.
Chlorophyll is used during photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is a process that takes places when a plant uses sunlight to turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar. Unlike animals, which have to hunt for their food, plants can create their own food using sunlight.
If you remove most plants from sunlight, they cannot produce food and will eventually die. So what makes chlorophyll green? Every object on Earth has its own color. The light from the sun appears white, but is actually made up of a full spectrum of colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
When white light hits an object, the object absorbs some colors and reflects others. When we look at an object, the color we see is the color the object reflects. The sky absorbs all the colors except blue, which it reflects. This is why the sky appears blue on a sunny day.
Similarly, grass appears green because it absorbs all the wavelengths of white light except green. Green is reflected off the grass. When the green wavelength reaches our eyes, we see grass as green.