The Process of The Rainbow

In general, we always see that rainbows are just natural phenomena that occur due to rain. But in this
occasion we are going to explain about how a rainbow is formed from the physics descriptions. In our
opinion, why this is interesting to discuss, because this topic is the application from which we had
learned.

The rainbow could occur in the waterfall, and when the air is being foggy, and when the air is very hot
but it rains very slowly. We could clearly see this phenomenon if we stand back to the sun.

This rainbow occurs because of refraction of the light. The rainbow is a large spectrum arc that occurs
due to refraction of sunlight by water grains. We have known, that refraction of lght is when the light
through two mediums with different optical densities and light coming not perpendicular to boundary
plane. And we’ve known that, every medium has refractive index. So that’s all happen because of the
difference between the speed of light in both media.

So, you could see that the rainbow on the prism. Prism is the clear material which is limited by two
angular surface fields. When the monochromatic light headed to prism. So you could see refraction of
light that is the rainbow. Basicly the rainbow only occur on the prism. But raindrops are one of the
object produced by nature which has properties such as prism.

We could see on this picture that, the prism experiences light dispersion. Light dispersion is a symptom
of the spread of waves when they spread through narrow slit or sharp edge of an monochromatic light.
So, if the white light is directed at the prism, white light will break down into red, orange, yellow, green,
blue, indigo, and purple light. Every wavelength has a different refractive index and different
wavelength. The smaller wavelength is the greater the refractive index. Disperenced on the prism occurs
because of the difference in the refractive index of the glass for every color of light. So the following are
the data of wavelength and refractive index of rainbow colors.

Every light has different angle of deviation the difference between the deviation angle for purple and
red light is called dispersion angle.

So, rainbows occur because of refraction of light at an angle of 40°-42°. The rainbow shape is actually a
circle, but we only see a half circles it happens because the rainbow is cut off by the earth’s horizon. The
sun's position of the observer and the rainbow will always be in one axis, where the sun will always be
behind the observer. We cannot see the rainbow if the position of the sun is perpendicular to the
horizontal line of the earth.

in theory, all rainbows are actually double rainbows. who have primary rainbows and secondary
rainbows. because sometimes secondary rainbows are rarely seen. Secondary rainbows are caused by
double reflections of sunlight in water droplets. Technically the second arc is centered on the sun itself,
but because the size of the angle is more than 90 ° (about 127 ° for purple to 130 ° for red), it looks on
the same side as the primary rainbow, about 10 ° outside at a clear angle 50-53 °. so the secondary
rainbow looks the opposite of the secondary rainbow