What is a rainbow and what causes it?

Question

What is a rainbow and what causes it?

Answer 1

this should explain everything......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow

hope this helps......

~D.~

Answer 2

A rainbow is caused by light refracting through moisture in the air.  This is why they apear to move as you move, simply because you are changing the angle that you are looking at the refacted light.   It works kind of like a prism when you shine a light through it.

Answer 3

Rainbows are optical illusions and meteorological phenomena that cause a spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the Sun shines onto droplets of moisture in the Earth's atmosphere. They take the form of a multicoloured arc, with red on the outer part of the arch and violet on the inner section of the arch. More rarely, a secondary rainbow is seen, which is a second, fainter arc, outside the primary arc, with colours in the opposite order, that is, with violet on the outside and red on the inside.

A rainbow spans a continuous spectrum of colours. Traditionally, however, the sequence is quantised. The most commonly cited and remembered sequence, in English, is Newton's sevenfold red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. "Roy G. Biv" and "Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain" are popular mnemonics. In east, the mnemonic is VIBGYOR.

Rainbows can be caused by other forms of water than rain, including mist, spray, dew, fog, and ice. Moreover, rainbows can have shapes other than a bow (arc), including stripes, circles, or even flames.

Answer 4

When sunlight strikes the atmosphere,it is scattered,and sometimes split into its component colours,by water droplets,ice crystals and dust particles in the air,causing a variety of optical illusions.One such optical illusion is the formation of a rainbow.

This atmospheric optical effect(ie, formation of rainbow) is the result of raindrops bending (refracting) light rays and acting much like prisms by splitting the sunlight into its seven component colours.Each colour emerges again at a slightly different angle depending upon its wavelenth,producing separate bands of colour.Red appears on the ouside.The higher the sun is in the sky,the flatter the rainbow.