How do rainbows form??

Question: How do rainbows form??

Asked by roses to Daniel, Jon, Louise, Sharon, Zoe on 21 Jun 2010 in Categories: General.
- Sharon Sneddon answered on 20 Jun 2010:
  
  Hi Roses, thanks for your question!
  Sunlight is composed of light of different wavelengths. Short wavelength light appears blue, violet and indigo, and long wavelength light appears red, orange and yellow. When sunlight enters a raindrop in the air, the light splits into a multitude of colors. This light then reflects off the back of the raindrop and re-emerges in the direction in which the light first entered. The light emerging from many raindrops creates a rainbow.
  The reason that rainbows are rare is that you will only see them when there is rain in front of you and somewhat in the distance, and the sun is behind you and fairly low on the horizon.
  Hope this makes sense!
- Louise Dash answered on 20 Jun 2010:
  
  Hi roses
  
  Rainbows are formed when sunlight passes through raindrops. The light is bent (“refracted”) by the raindrops. White light, like sunlight, is made up of all different colours of light, and the different colours of light each have a different wavelength.
  
  How much the light is bent depends on the wavelength of the light, and the shortest wavelengths (violet light) are bent more than the longest wavelengths (red light), which is why red is on the top, then orange, yellow, etc down to violet at the bottom.
- Jon Copley answered on 20 Jun 2010:
  
  To see a rainbow, you need three things – water droplets in the air, bright sunlight, and to be standing at just the right angle to see the effect.
  
  Sunlight is made up of light of different colours, which are usually combined to appear white. But when sunlight shines into a water droplet, the rays of different colours get deflected by different amounts, because they have different wavelengths. This splits the colours up to produce the separate colours of the rainbow.
  
  However, to see this effect (and to see the rainbow as an arc in the sky), the angle between the Sun’s rays shining into the water droplet and the spread-out rays of colour leaving it needs to be between 40 and 42 degrees. The water droplets that are in the right place to give this angle form an arc in the sky, for an observer standing on the ground.
  
  Actually, if you are in an aeroplane, it is possible to see a rainbow as a complete circle, half above and half below you. Because the ground is not in the way when you are flying, there is a full circle of water droplets that give the 40-42 degree angle needed to see the rainbow effect.
- Zoe Duck answered on 21 Jun 2010:
  
  Rainbows are formed by a combination of light and rain. The light from the sun is made of lots of different wavelengths which we see as lots of different colours. Sometimes, such as when it rains, the light passes through a object ~(in this case a raindrop) which splits the colours of light so we can see each wavelength seperately, so we see a rainbow

Question: How do rainbows form??

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