Question

Which of the following is an example of dispersion of light?
a. Lunar Eclipse
b. Formation of clouds
c. Formation of Rainbow
d. Mirage

Answer 1

Hint: Whenever light passes through non-parallel sided media (generally known as prisms), it slows down and bends as it goes from rarer medium, air to the denser medium, glass prism. Then it bends again as it leaves the glass medium and goes back to the air medium. Thus, the light is deviated from its initial path and due to this, the white light gets dispersed to a band of seven colors.

Complete answer:
The rainbow – one of nature’s most captivating wonders. It shimmers in all colors. But the real question is what happens to make white sunlight appear as a multi-colored extravaganza!

The reason for this is that white daylight, that is, white-colored light, simply does not exist. White daylight is always made up of different light waves from the color spectrum. The opposite effect, the splitting of white light, is what produces a rainbow and makes all the different colors visible. Raindrops are a key ingredient in making it happen.

When sun and rain meet, the ray of light falls on the water droplet and is split and reflected inside the raindrop’s inner wall. When it leaves the droplet, it splits once more. A prism illustrates this process very clearly when a source of light acts as the sun and the prism acts as a raindrop.

Hence, the correct answer is option (C).

Note: Each and every spectrum color is broken at a different angle and thus all color bands are not uniform in the spectrum. Splitting of light dictates that the larger the water droplet, the more intensive the colors will be. Moreover, a water droplet’s spherical shape diffracts the sun’s rays in a bow-like form and the lower the sun is in the sky, the higher the rainbow appears.