Remember when glow in the dark toys were all the rage as a kid?
There were bouncy balls and plastic bugs and those little green stars that everybody stuck on their ceilings.
I totally did that.
So you have to ask as a member of the human species, how do they work?
Some TV commercials claimed 'magic'.
But it's really thanks to these chemical compounds called phosphors.
A phosphor is a substance that absorbs energy from another source, like a light for example, and then emits that energy as visible light, which is the glow we see.
There are natural phosphors in your teeth and fingernails, which is why they glow after absorbing energy from a blacklight.
But chemists have created lots of phosphors.
And the common ones in glow in the dark toys are zinc sulfide and strontium aluminate.
