How Do Rainbows Form?
SciShow explains how three important ingredients -- sunlight, water, and you -- interact to create the illusion of a rainbow. The colorful details are inside!
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To make a rainbow, you need three ingredients: sunlight, water, and you. Sunlight, as you probably know, consists of all of the colors in the visible spectrum, as well as a bunch of wavelengths of light that we can’t see. And when light travels from one medium -- like air -- to another, denser medium -- like water -- it slows down, and exits the new medium at a different angle than it entered. This is called refraction. In the case of water, light can enter a droplet, bounce off its inner surface, like a mirror, and then exit at sharp angle. And because each color has a different wavelength, they’re each slowed to a different degree and refracted at a different angle. So red light will exit the drop at 42 degrees from the angle at which the sunlight entered. But blue light, near the op...
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To make a rainbow, you need three ingredients: sunlight, water, and you. Sunlight, as you probably know, consists of all of the colors in the visible spectrum, as well as a bunch of wavelengths of light that we can’t see. And when light travels from one medium -- like air -- to another, denser medium -- like water -- it slows down, and exits the new medium at a different angle than it entered. This is called refraction. In the case of water, light can enter a droplet, bounce off its inner surface, like a mirror, and then exit at sharp angle. And because each color has a different wavelength, they’re each slowed to a different degree and refracted at a different angle. So red light will exit the drop at 42 degrees from the angle at which the sunlight entered. But blue light, near the op...
