Rainbow Sripes!

On Day 108, Mr. Bender turned out the lights and we saw some pretty special rainbows! Our spectroscopes allowed us to see what lights were really made up of, and we viewed several different light sources to compare and contrast. Here are a few we saw:

Hydrogen:

Neon:

Natural (Sunlight):

Fluorescent (in the ceiling):

As human beings, we can only see from 400 nanometers to 700 nanometers. Anything after or before that is not visible to the human eye. At first, we had a little difficulty using them, as we did not know exactly know what we were looking for. Mr. Bender cleared that up pretty soon, when he realized some of us were confused. But after that, we started noticing all these random lines and dark spaces....

So what causes the jerky rainbow? These brights lines or stripes are called spectral lines, and they exist because energy in light drops in quantums (discovered by Max Planck ). A quantum is a tiny packet of electric charge and light in an atom. When losing or gaining energy, an atom must gain or lose an entire quantum of energy. And results from each of these jumps or drops in a bright stripe, which we can see! Any jump or drop too high goes into the UV range, and we can't see those.

Who gets credit for doing the work? Well Bohr, a Danish physicist in the 20th century, did a lot of the work. He calculated and did the work involved in figuring out the energies in a quantum, but there is a slight issue: his work was only true for Hydrogen! However, his contribution is still great and he gave us a lot of work with. Bohr said that electrons can only occupy certain orbits at certain energy levels, and that electrons have special "allowed" energies. Energy is only absorbed or emitted to move an electron from one "allowed" energy state to another.