This evening I was digging a hole for a post. Deep in the hole it was very dark. The digging bar I was using would send off large orange/red sparks when it hit a rock. Being the amateur physicist that I am. I thought, wow, those are about 650 nanometer waves. But, I knew no magnetic lines of flux were cut. I also knew that when an electron is moved to a higher orbit and then falls back down EM waves are generated. So was my bar actually stripping electrons away. What was going on?
Answer
It is the same as the way flint lighters work, steel hitting "rock" .
Iron, whether man-made objects or naturally occurring in rocks, will rust upon exposure to oxygen in the air. The act of rusting is actually an exothermic reaction called “oxidation”, which is a fancy way of saying when iron touches the oxygen in the air a reaction occurs; the iron rusts (turns into iron oxide) and gives off heat. In other words, it burns. The simplified chemical reaction can be expressed as:
Fe2 + O2 = Fe2O3 + heat
Or in simple English: Iron + Oxygen = Rust + Heat
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Small Particles Have Larger Surface Area – As can be seen in this illustration, the total surface area of the smaller cubes greatly exceeds the surface are of the cube taken as a whole.When a tiny particle of fresh iron is broken off from the main mass, the surface area of the particle is very large in comparison to its total size.Upon contact with oxygen in the air, the tiny iron spontaneously ignites (also known as rusts or oxidizes) and glows red hot.
On the atomic level of the broken off cubes, black body radiation mechanisms are involved, transitions in vibrational and rotational levels of the molecules and at the tail of the black body distribution electron excitations and deexcitations.The initial energy is supplied by the chemical proccess: iron oxide is at a lower energy level than pure iron +O2.
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