Colors feathers,
Behind the enchanting eye of a peacock feather lies an extremely secure railing.
Chinese physicists fought some of these grids, and unfolded exactly how the peacock's colors originated.
The patsers of the bird kingdom are sometimes called them. Peacocks show off with their veil of colorful feathers.
How the bird comes to this color force is now no secret anymore.
Chinese physicists exposed the intricate structures that form the eye of a peacock feather.
The peacock requires only one kind of dye to make all the desired colors, according to the Chinese.
A clever accumulation of those substances eventually gives the feather its color.
The peacock feathers look like CDs. If you look at different angles, you sometimes see special colors.
But CDs do not contain any pigment. The colorful reflection of light is the result of tiny but regular structures.
If the building blocks are approximately as large as a light wave, light rays are scattered.
The rays then fall into different colors. A peacock feather also has such structures, Rongtang Fu disks and his colleagues at Tuhan University in Shanghai this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Under an electron microscope, they saw that the smallest parts were arranged in long rows of layers, just like the bars of a grating fence. Researchers have known this for a long time, but how coloring works exactly was not known yet.
According to the Chinese, the way the building blocks are stacked ultimately determines the color we see.
In a computer simulation, they showed that the distance between the building blocks determines which colors a peacock feather gets. A larger distance produces blue, green, yellow or brown in succession, write the Chinese.
In addition, the color depends on the number of layers of lattice that is pinned in a spring.
A dozen layers lead to blue and green, a smaller number to yellow and eventually brown.
The Chinese study closely resembles the work of a group of Japanese physicists, who also tries to unravel the secret of the peacock feather. Both teams saw that the railing of a peacock feather is made up of melanin granules, which is a dye itself.
But the grains do not give color to a feather. Why does a peacock use no colorless material, the Japanese were already wondering last year. They also saw the well-ordered melanin grains by an electron microscope.
According to them, these kinds of grains absorb the light that would otherwise reflect on the feather.
As a result, the remaining colors are extra bright. However, their publication did not release so much at the time, as it was printed in a magazine specifically for the Japanese research community.
Aschwin Tenfelde J. Zi et.al: Coloration strategies in peacock feathers. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, online publication (October 13, 2003). S. Yoshioka and S Kinoshita: Effect of macroscopic structure in iridescent color of the peacock feathers. In: Forma, vol. 17, pg. 169 (April 2002).