Astronomy 1021 Chapter 5: 5. Light - the Cosmic Messenger
11 Oct 2017
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Document Summary
Today, we can analyze the light of distant objects to learn what they are made of, how hot they are, how fast they are moving, and much more. Sun"s spectrum: the colours of sunlight are spread out in horizontal rows from the upper left to the lower right. Sun"s spectrum contains hundreds of dark lines, representing places where a small piece of the rainbow is mission. Newton demonstrated that the colour came from the light by placing a second prism infront of the light of just one colour from the first prism. If the rainbow of colour came from the prism itself, the second prism would have produced a rainbow just like the first, but it didn"t: when only red light entered the second prism, only red light emerged. Newton"s experiment showed that white light is a mix of all the colours.
