I was asked:

‘In the sun’s spectrum there are black lines at special wavelengths’
This threw me a bit, and so in the continuing paragraph I also got confused. The ‘spectrum’ is the range of light yes? I’m not sure why there are black lines in there. And so then are these black lines acting as blackbody? Are the black lines matter? or more electromagnetic waves?

So let me explore that a little more.

The spectrum is the rainbow – but extending beyond the visible. It’s the light spread out in different wavelengths. Above is the photo NASA took of the spectrum from the top of a mountain in Arizona, USA. Note that really it’s one line going from red to blue, (it’s not 2D – they just made it that way to fit on a page!). The colour you see is the spectrum from about 800 nm (top left) to about 400 nm (bottom right) – the visible part of the solar spectrum. (Note that the solar spectrum actually goes from about 200 nm in the UV to about 3000 nm in the infrared – but we can only see this little bit of it).

You also see black lines in the spectrum. These come from gases either in the outer part of the sun or in our own atmosphere that absorb light with particular wavelengths because that light has exactly the right energy (E = h nu) to make an electron jump from one orbit to another. Later the atom might release that energy going back down again – but, this is the crucial bit, it won’t do so in the same direction that the light was going in in the first place (and sometimes that will then cause another atom’s electron to jump up). So less light gets to us at those wavelengths than should – and we see black lines in our spectrum.