Science WebQuest

Electromagnetic Spectrum	Wavelength	Frequency	Energy
Radio Waves	947981.1 m	15632.2 Hz	1.036e-29 J
Micro Waves	.00359 m	8.349e10 Hz	5.532e-23 J
Infrared Waves	2.21411 m	1.211e12 Hz	8.026e-22 J
Visible Light	7.530e-7 m	3.981e14 Hz	2.638e-19J
UV Rays	2.379e-8m	1.260e16 Hz	8.3410e-18 J
X-Rays	1.900e-11 m	1.578e19 Hz	1.045e-14
Gamma Rays	4.289e-16 m	6.989e23 Hz	4.631e-10 J

Wave/Ray	How it is used:
Radio Waves	AM/FM radio, TV, Communications.
Micro Waves	Heating up food, radar.
Infrared Waves	Radiation.
Visible Light	Lamps, cars, security, electronics.
UV Rays	Tanning beds.
X-Rays	Medical diagnosis.
Gamma Rays	Nuclear power plants.

                                                                               6. Wavelengths:

 What are two space items that are observed by radiation: Satellites & telescopes.

This narrow band of visible light is affectionately known as ROYGBV.

4. What does each letter stand for?

 Each letter stands for red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.

5. Explain how Roy G. Bv lost a vowel.

Indigo (the B”I”V) isn’t easily distinguished in the color spectrum. Therefore it was dropped.

7. Explain how rainbows are formed…

Raindrops in the air act as tiny prisms, in rainbows. “Light enters the raindrop, reflects off of the side of the drop and exits. In the process, it is broken into a spectrum just like it is in a triangular glass prism. A prism is a triangular piece of glass or plastic. To get it to produce a mini-rainbow, you allow a narrow strip of white light to fall on one face of the triangle.” The triangle has something called a refractive index, which causes the light to bend, thus you see the rainbow.

8. Explain how a mirage is created…

 To generate a mirage, the air must be 1 part cold and one part hot. Since hot air is usually denser and cold air is commonly thin, the edge in between the two parts of air can bend, or refract the visible light. Mirages happen more often if the light hits the edge at a sharp angle. “The oasis mirage occurs when the air just above the ground gets hot because the ground heats it.”



9. So why is the sky blue?

 Some of the light from the Sun, when high in the sky, travels towards Earth and is sprinkled towards us by the molecules in our atmosphere. A big part of this scattered light is light from the blue end of the spectrum, so we get to gaze at the beautiful BLUE sky.

b. The colors of the sunset…
When you see a sunset, the sun is refracting across the surface of the Earth. If the path is long enough, the violet and blue lights are longer than our eye can see. This leaves the red, orange, and pink colors for us to observe. This is why sunsets are usually pink, orange and red.