Question: what is a flame?

Pete Etchells answered on 26 Apr 2012:

BRILLIANT question, chelseastyles! It’s quite a tough one too, but I’ll have a crack at it. Try and imagine a bonfire, on Guy Fawkes night. It’s built using wood as fuel, and wood, like everything else in the world, is made up of atoms. When we start to raise the temperature of the wood (say, by rubbing two bits of dry wood together really quickly), this excites the electrons inside the atoms, giving them enough energy to jump from their orbit around the atom’s nucleus, to a higher orbit. However, electrons generally don’t like being moved around like this, so will try and move back to where they were originally. To do this, they need to lose the energy that they’ve been given, and they do this by throwing out heat and light. if you imagine trillions of atoms all doing this at the same time, then all of that heat and light is what we see as a flame!