How Light and Water Collaborate to Create Stunning Rainbows!
Let me give you an insight into the fascinating conceptualization of the rainbow process. Rainbows are the visible spectrum of light, which is the sun’s white light, broken up by the water droplets in the atmosphere. In fact, sunlight, which is white to us, is composed of multiple colors. Like the sequence of the notes, when you combine red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet (ROYGBIV) you get a rainbow which can be seen when the sunlight is shining through the atmosphere full of tiny water drops.
Here’s how sunlight evolves in a raindrop:
- Refraction: The light is slowed down and bent by the water droplet.
- Reflection: The light is reflected back to the droplet.
- Dispersion: The light is spread into different colors, and each color slightly bends on a different angle of No Water.
- Refraction (again): The light is causing a rainbow that we observe.
The patterns of the light have a 42-degree angle, this is why the rainbows look like an arc. The colors are placed in order; the red is in the outer, the violet is in the inner edge. That is because of the distance covered by each thereby refracting at different angles.
A particular event is the double rainbow, which results from light reflecting twice inside a water droplet. As a consequence, two rainbows, one in the main and the other reverse one, will appear. The colors of them will move in the opposite direction from the usual direction of the primary one.
In summary, rainbows are very vibrant examples of how light interacts with water. They only appear when the necessary conditions are given, and those are the periods of sun and rain. Moreover, this collection of nature’s masterpieces stands as a tribute to the physical laws governing the everyday world.
