Light Wave Rainbows

What is light? Brightness, electricity, light bulbs, fire and energy are all different definitions of light. Sunlight travels 94 million miles to Earth to provide us light! Light travels in waves and moves very quickly, light travels at 186,000 miles per second. That is like walking around the Earth’s circumference 7.5 times in the time it takes you to snap your fingers!

Light waves travel in straight lines, including the sun’s rays traveling towards Earth. Once these rays of light hit Earth’s atmosphere, the protective layer of gasses surrounding Earth, these rays and intercepted and scattered! We call this scattering of light the electromagnetic spectrum, and the light is separated into a range of wavelengths and frequencies. Visible light makes up a very small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The remainder of the spectrum is light we cannot see, like x-rays and microwaves!

While visible light is a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, we can divide this visible light into colors! ROY G BIV (red orange yellow green blue indigo and violet) is an acronym that can help you remember the colors of the light spectrum, or the colors in a rainbow! Rainbows occur when visible light is refracted through water droplets in the atmosphere, most often after a light rain, and this reflected light scatters into all the colors of the light spectrum!

In today’s experiment of the day, you can make your very own rainbow! Get all your experiment supplies by visiting: https://sciencemadefun.net/downloads/bubble_atmosphere.pdf