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Asked by to David, Johanna, Linda, Tamas, Tom on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Linda Cremonesi answered on 19 Jun 2014:
The reason is because the colours you see come from light.
So the rainbow emits light at different frequencies, and light propagates as a wave and it hits your eyes and you see blue, red or yellow or any colour!
At each colour correspond a different frequency and with the frequency of blue being higher than the frequency for red. So the colours in the rainbow are in order of frequency!2 interesting trivia about rainbows:
– if you see 2 rainbows, the second one would be bigger and would have colours in reverse order
– if you are lucky enough to see a rainbow from a plane, it will appear as a complete circle! It’s amazing 😀
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David Davila answered on 20 Jun 2014:
Yup, the order of the colours of the rainbow depend on the “frequency” of the light!
I don’t really know why (probably because of physics magic) but when light passes through certain objects, like glass or water, it bends. And light with lower frequencies get bent less than light with higher frequencies. You can see that in this picture
Red light has a lowwwww frequency, and orange light has a slightly higher frequency, and then yellow and green and blue and violet light has the highest frequency of all!
So when the light of the sun hits water in the air, we’re seeing that light being separated into a rainbow! -
Thomas Smith answered on 26 Jun 2014:
The light we see in a rainbow has come from the sun. The sun is very hot (around 5,500 °C) and because it is very hot, it emits lots of visible light. Over hundreds of millions of years, animals on this planet have evolved to have eyes that are sensitive to this light, which is why we call it “visible”. The sun also emits some infrared light and ultraviolet light (which we can’t see).
When you see a rainbow you have to imagine the path that light has taken through the atmosphere. Sunlight (white light containing a mixture of all colours) enters the atmosphere, and when it is close to the ground it encounters rain droplets. The rain droplets behave like prisms and split the white light into all of its components – all of the colours, but also infrared, and ultraviolet. All the different colours, infrared and ultraviolet have different wavelengths, and the rain droplets act to put these in order of their wavelengths (just like if you were told to stand in height order). The reason why a rainbow goes red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, is because red has the longest wavelength, orange slightly shorter, and violet the shortest.
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