What do flame tests tell us about the structure of an atom?
The color of the flame in flame tests don’t really tell much about how atoms are construced, but they do give a feeling for how much energy the atom absorbs and releases when exposed to incoming energy from the energetic molecules in a hot flame. It turns out that the heated atom absorbs energy from the flame, its electrons, upon gaining energy go to a higher energy state, moving outward from the nucleus as they absorb energy, then when the excited atom is able to escape from the flame to some extent, its excited electrons fall back to their original positions which is referred to as its “ground state” and when they are falling back to ground state they release the absorbed energy in the form of visable light of a specific color. More energy realeased causes the light to be toward the purple end of the visable spectrum, and less energy released causes the light to be toward the red end of the spectrum.
