What causes a rainbow?

Answer 1

Good question and here is a short scientific answer.
When you see a rainbow, you are standing between the Sun and the rainbow, with rain between you and the rainbow. The sunlight comes from behind your back and is reflected from the drops of rain in the direction of the rainbow and back to your eyes. The rain drops separate the white light of the Sun, a process called refraction, into its separate colors violet through orange and red. Check this out the next time you see a rainbow. Look to see where you are, where the sun is, and where the rainbow is. Ok?

Answer 2

Caused by the sunlight. The sunlight passes through the raindrops and the white light changes to the colors of the rainbow just like using a flashlight and a prism

Answer 3

A rainbow is an optical and meteorological phenomenon that causes a nearly continuous spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the Sun shines onto droplets of moisture in the Earth's atmosphere. It takes the form of a multicoloured arc, with red on the outside and violet on the inside. More rarely, a double rainbow is seen, which includes a second, fainter arc with colours in the opposite order, that is, with violet on the outside and red on the inside.

Answer 4

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You know that light is made up of a collection of many colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. That is why a prism can take in white light on one side and produce its own mini-rainbow on the other side. To understand rainbows, you have to start by understanding what is happening inside a prism to let it separate white light into its colors.

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, like this:

The dispersion of colors in a prism occurs because of something called the refractive index of the glass. Every material has a different refractive index. When light enters a material (for example, when light traveling through the air enters the glass of a prism), the difference in the refractive index of air and glass causes the light to bend. The angle of bending is different for different wavelengths of light. As the white light moves through the two faces of the prism, the different colors bend different amounts and in doing so spread out into a rainbow.

In a rainbow, raindrops in the air act as tiny prisms. 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, like this:

The angle between the ray of light coming in and the ray coming out of the drops is 42 degrees for red and 40 degrees for violet. You can see in this diagram that the angles cause different colors from different drops to reach your eye, forming a circular rim of color in the sky -- a rainbow! In a double rainbow, the second bow is produced because droplets can have two reflections internally and get the same effect. The droplets have to be the right size to get two reflections to work.

Use the link

http://www.howstuffworks.com/question41.htm

Answer 5

the sun and the rain causes a rainbow

Answer 6

Rainbows are produced by refraction (bending) and reflection of visable light as it passes through rain drops/or lots of water vapor in the air (that's why they are usually seen after it rains). Blue light is refracted more than red light causing a separation of colors.

Answer 7

It is caused when sun is in the sky and rain falls. The raindrops when fall act as a prism and disperse sun's light into 7 colours...as when a white light is passed through a prism, it disperses into 7 colours (constituents of white light).

Answer 8

The sun reflecting off that pot o' gold at the end of it... :)

Answer 9

GOD