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Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works.

Hey, brain Stuff, this is Christian Seger.

You have seen glow sticks before.

I bet they bring a festive glow to Halloween, trick or treating and New Year's Eve celebrations.

And they are a useful gear for explorers, from scuba divers to spelunkers.

When you find a bunch of people gathered at a party in the dark, at least a few of them will probably be wielding glow sticks.

But what the heck are these things and how do they work well?

Glow sticks are powered by a process called kemma luminescence.

Don't let the name scare you.

Luminescence is just a fancy word for any emission of light not caused by heating.

We see luminescence and stuff like TVs, neon signs and fireflies.

The chemo luminescence in glow sticks is a pretty simple reaction caused by mixing chemical compounds.

Compounds are made up of different elements bonded together in specific proportions so that they can't be mechanically separated.

It takes a chemical reaction to sort out, for example, the oxygen from the hydrogen in water.

When you mix a compound with other stuff, you can set off that reaction, and as the atoms rearrange themselves, they'll either absorb or release energy.

If you look inside a glow stick, you'll see that there's a small glass vial in the tube.

This file typically contains a hydrogen peroxide solution called the activator.

It's floating in a solution containing a compound called phenol oxalate ester and a fluorescent dye.

You still with me, Okay.

When you snap a glow stick, the vile breaks and the hydrogen peroxide reacts with the phenyl oxalate ester, creating two other compounds, phenol and a paraoxy acid esther Okay, still with me again.

Okay, this paraoxy acid stuff is unstable, so it decomposes and produces additional phenol.

It also produces a cyclic perioxy compound, which decomposes to carbon dioxide.

This decomposition releases energy to the dye.

The electrons in the dyes atoms jump to a higher level than fall back down, releasing energy in the form of light.

The other chemicals in the fluorescent dye determine the color of this light.

All this happens within moments of snapping and shaking your glow stick.

Depending on which compounds are used, the chemical reaction can continue for anywhere from just a few minutes to hours.

Warmer temperatures will accelerate the reaction, making the stick glow brighter, but for a shorter amount of time.

When it's cooler, the reaction will slow down, making the light dimmer, Which means that if you want to preserve your light stick, put it in the freezer overnight.

It won't stop the process, but it will slow it down and drag out the reaction.

So it turns out that there's some pretty nifty science behind the humble glow stick.

Check it out the next time you're scuba diving, partying, or you know whatever it is you do in the dark.

Check out the brain stuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.