The Electromagnetic Spectrum Londonderry School Disrict伦敦德里郡学区电磁频谱.docVIP

The Electromagnetic Spectrum To start with you should know what a spectrum is: when white light is shone through a prism it is separated out into all the colors of the rainbow, this is the visible spectrum. White light is a mixture of all the colors. Black is not a color, it is what you get when you all the light is taken away. The visible spectrum is just one small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The electromagnetic spectrum is made up of an electric field and a magnetic field. The two fields are at right angles to each other. Electromagnetic waves are waves of energy that can travel through space, unlike waves in the ocean or waves of sound. Waves in the ocean are waves of energy that travel through water. Waves of sound are waves of energy that move through air or some other medium to create sound. Electromagnetic waves don’t need a medium to move through anything. They are magnetic and electric “force fields” that travel at the speed of light through empty space in the shape of waves. Its hard to imagine radiation moving as waves through empty space without a medium to transfer the wave form. Though we describe electromagnetic radiation as invisible waves of energy, at the smallest scale it behaves as a particle, like when light is emitted by a single atom or molecule. When energy is given off there is a change in the orbital pattern of the electrons that surround the nucleus of an atom. As the orbit changes, a bundle of energy or a tiny particle called a photon is released. However, particles of light differ from particles of matter: they have no mass, occupy no space, and travel at the speed of light, 3.0 x 108 meters or 186,000 miles per second. The amount of energy carried by a photon varies inversely with wavelength, the shorter the wavelength, the more energetic the photon. Light consists of tiny particles or photons and they travel in waves. When photons hit something they might be reflected or scattered