• Question: What r rainbows?

    Asked by (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ to David, Eva, Kate, Nicholas, Rachel on 15 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Nicholas Pearce

      Nicholas Pearce answered on 15 Nov 2015:

      Hey,

      Rainbows are made from sunlight and rain.
      We don’t usually think of sunlight as being coloured, but really it’s a mixture of the colours we see in a rainbow. When a beam of sunlight (which is white) passes through a prism, it slows down, causing it to change direction. Some colours slow down more than others and change direction more, splitting the light into a rainbow, like in this picture:

      Raindrops do exactly this-separating out the colours of light and sending them to your eye. Rainbows have their shape because they can only bend the light in your direction from a certain angle (raindrops not at this angle will send the light somewhere else) and all the raindrops that happen to be at just the right angle make up that ‘bow’ shape.

      Here’s a short youtube explaining more about the colours of rainbows:

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