Wtf is a rainbow?

Morning Leprechauns!

We’ve all probably asked this question before…

Staring out the window at a beautiful bridge of colors in the sky.

What ACTUALLY are rainbows?

Well, to make a one you need these 3 things:

Sunlight, water and a little physics

First let's look at sunlight.

What color would you say this is?

White?

Wrong! In reality, it’s actually a mixture of a bunch of colors like red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet…

And for some reason, that makes white.

Ok… what about water?

That's the easy part. If it's just rained for example, there will be millions of tiny water droplets just floating around in the air.

Perfect!

Now for the final ingredient… a little bit of physics.

So, when light travels through one substance – like air – to another, slightly denser substance – like water – it slows down a lil bit and bounces off its inner surface, like a mirror then exits all wonky at a different angle.

This is called refraction.

But remember how we said sunlight is made up of all the colors?

Well, each one of those colors has a different “wavelength” meaning each color goes through the raindrop slightly differently and is shot out at a slightly different angle.

Red light for example exits the droplet at 42 degrees from the angle it entered at.

Whereas the magenta color exits the droplet at 40 degrees.

This is where the colors in rainbows come from, all of them are within that 2 degree window.

But for a rainbow to actually form…

You also need VERY specific conditions.

For example rainbows can only happen if the sunlight is coming from behind you and is quite low in the sky.

Then the sunlight needs to shine into a wall of water droplets in the air.

And with all those droplets refracting only a certain wavelength of light that hits your eye, together they create the illusion of a rainbow.

Stay Cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan 🌈

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