The Stars of Fireworks

Fourth of July celebration featuring fireworks, Portland, Ore. Credit: Eric Baetscher, Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.2

Tomorrow, as people across the United States celebrate Independence Day, they will be treated to dazzling pyrotechnic displays, in which fireworks explode into fantastic showers of sparkles, strobes of color, and even smiley faces, much to the delight of onlookers. How those bewildering arrays of patterns and fusions of color emerge from what essentially amounts to a paper cylinder with some string and a few “stars” packaged inside comes down to chemistry.

A firework consists of a small handful of parts, which typically include a lift charge, fuse, and launch tube for propelling the device off the ground and a concoction of black powder (potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur), “stars,” and a time-delay fuse, which together produce the explosion and color display. The stars are the secret to color. Although their appearance in the packaged firework is rather uninspiring (they look like dense, dark lumps), upon ignition of the black powder in mid-air, they burst into brilliant colors, owing to their secret ingredient—metal salts.

Metal salts produce color in two ways: incandescence and luminescence. Heat underlies incandescence. As metal salts grow hotter, their color changes from infrared to red to yellow. Desired colors can be produced by controlling temperature, with the addition of metals such as aluminum and titanium being used to increase temperature. Luminescence is independent of heat. Rather, color produced via this mechanism entails the absorption of energy by electrons, which sends them into higher, unstable energy states. The additional energy is quickly given off in the form of photons of light. The amount of energy in a photon determines its color. Examples of characteristic colors produced by specific metal salts include red for carbonate, violet for potassium nitrate, blue for copper chloride, and white for magnesium powder.

Stars often also are packaged into shells that burst into specific patterns, such as rings or umbrellas, in which stars leave arcing trails behind them as they fall from the sky. The time-delay fuse ensures that the shell carrying the black powder and stars explodes at an optimal-display altitude.

Fireworks display in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, on Oct. 1, 2009, during the observance of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Credit: Feng Li/Getty Images

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