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Asked by SMILEY_FACE_:) to Hephzi, Imogen, Jen, Jennifer, Tom on 11 Mar 2015.
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Hephzi Tagoe answered on 11 Mar 2015:
Light generally travels in a straight line until it travels from a less dense medium to a more dense medium in which case it is refracted.
Rainbow is formed from sunlight hitting water droplets in the atmosphere. Because the water is heaveier than the air the light bends. The light first hits the droplet, then it bounces off the back of the droplet and travels back to the other side where it bends once again on its way out. This is what causes the rainbow shape. You can see this effect when you drop a pencil in a glass of water. The pencil looks bent from the outside of the glass when you look from different angles.
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Thomas Barrett answered on 11 Mar 2015:
Light does travel in straight lines. The rainbow is curved as the straight lines of light are being scattered from droplets of water from different places.
The amount light bends as it passes through the droplet depends on the light’s wavelength, or color — red light bends the most, orange and yellow slightly less, and so on, down to violet, which bends the least.
Since each color is bent through a specific angle — red light comes from the sun and is reflected back at an angle 42 degrees away from its original direction, while blue light bends only 40 degrees — each color appears at a different place in the sky. Red, say, denotes all those locations in the sky 42 degrees away from an imaginary line connecting the sun to the back
of your head. Together, these places trace out an arch.
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