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Hi sdanke,
Good question! The centre “hole” of your iris (the coloured part of your eye) is called your pupil. It regulates how light gets into your eye, by how big it is.
As it is a hole, it has no colour. It appears black because the light that goes though it to the back of your eye is absorbed by the eye, and not reflected/bouncing back out of the pupil to give a colour.
When light does get reflected, which is what happens when you get red eye, you see the colour red as the back of your eye is full of blood vessels.
Hope that makes sense 😀
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What Yashar said…. 🙂 But did you know that the pupil dilates in response to light…but also in response to strong emotions? And that eyes evolved about 500 millions years ago…and 95% of animals on earth have eyes of some sort.
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Lucky we have Yashar the eye expert!
Honestly, the eyeball makes me a but grossed-out! 🙂
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You can conduct an experiment to test how your pupil dilates in response to light by looking in a mirror and opening your eyes as wide as you can. It’s easier to see if you put up a hand to partly shade your eyes. If you shade them so that less light falls on your eyes, the pupils get bigger — like an owl. If you take your hand away so that more light falls on your eyes, the pupils get smaller.
How does the pupil get smaller or bigger in light or dark? The coloured circle around your pupil, the iris, is actually a little circular muscle that can make the pupil smaller or larger. The iris muscle is controlled by nerves that connect to give a quick reflex action, the kind of nerve control you never think about. The iris works automatically to change the size of the pupil and the amount of light that it lets into your eyes.
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Nicely answered by our expert panel!
Hey Yashar, I remember doing a dissection of a cows eye and the liquid inside the eye- aqueous humor- I think, was black. Does that also relate to why the pupil appears black? Sorry silly question!
🙂
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