Chapter 4: Lights and Atoms

Learning Objectives
Upon completing this chapter you should be able to:
• Identify the basic properties of light, contrasting its
wave-like and particle-like characteristics.
• Describe the meaning of the wavelength and
frequency of light and how they relate to its color.
• Explain what white light is.
• Relate the different bands of electromagnetic radiation
to visible light and to each other.
• Calculate the energy of photons from their
wavelength.
• Compare the different temperature scales and explain
why the Kelvin scale is more useful for scientific
comparisons than the Celsius or Fahreheit scale.
• Describe how and under what conditions the color of an
object changes with temperature, and use Wien’s law to
calculate its temperature.
• Describe how electrons and photons interact to produce
emission or absorption lines, and explain the resulting
spectrum for hydrogen gas.
• Explain how spectra can be used to determine chemical
composition of an astronomical source, and identify the
main elements that are encountered astronomically.
• Classify the physical conditions in objects according to
whether they produce a continuum, absorption, or
emission spectrum.
• Indicate the way’s earth’s atmosphere interacts with light
across the electromagnetic spectrum.
• Describe the conditions that produce a Doppler shift, and
carry out a calculation using the Doppler formula to
measure astronomical motions.
4.1 Properties of Light
Light it is an energy that can travel through space from one
point to another without. the need of a direct physical link.
The Nature o Light-Waves or Particles
According to one model, light is a wave that is a mix of
electric and magnetic energy, changing together, as depicted in
figure 4.1A. Because light is a mix of electric and magnetic
energy, it is often called an electromagnetic wave or
electromagnetic radiation.
light may be thought of as a stream of particles called
photons.
According to the laws of quantum physics, subatomic
particles such as electrons and protons can also behave like
waves. Or this reason, scientist often speak of light and
subatomic particles as having a wave-particles duality, and
they use whether e or model-wave or particles-best describe a
particular phenomenon.
 The Nature of Lights
•Light is radiant energy.
• Travels very fast – 300,000
km/sec!
• Can be described either as a
wave or as a particle traveling
through space.

• As a wave…
– A small disturbance in an electric field creates a small magnetic
field, which in turn creates a small electric field, and so on…
Light propagates itself “by its bootstraps!”
– Light waves can interfere with other light waves, canceling or
amplifying them!
–The color of light is determined by its wavelength.
• As a particle…
– Particles of light (photons) travel through space.
– These photons have very specific energies. that is, light is
quantized.
– Photons strike your eye (or other sensors) like a very small
bullet, and are detected.
The Effect of Distance on Light
• Light from distant objects seems very dim
– Why? Is it because the photons are losing energy (Tired
Light)?
– No – the light is simply spreading out as it travels from its
source to its destination.
– The farther from the source you are, the dimmer the light
seems
– We say that the object’s brightness, or amount of light
received from a source, is decreasing.
Wavelength
• The colors we see are determined by the wavelength
of light.
• Wavelength is the distance between successive crests
(or troughs) in an electromagnetic wave.
• This is very similar in concept to the distance between
the crests in ocean waves!
• We denote the wavelength of light by the symbol λ.
• Wavelengths of visible light are very small!
– Red light has a wavelength of 7×10-7 meters, or 700
nanometers (nm)
– Violet light has a wavelength of 4× 10-7 meters, or 400
nm
– Colors in between red and violet (remember ROY G
BIV?) have intermediate wavelengths
 White Light

• Light from the Sun arrives

with all wavelengths, and
we perceive this mixture of
colors as white
• Newton demonstrated that
white light could be split
into its component colors
with a prism, and then
recombined into white light
with a lens
 4.2 The Electromagnetic Spectrum:
Beyond Visible Light
Electromagnetic Spectrum the assemblage of all
wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. The spectrum
includes the following wavelengths, from long to short:
radio, microwave, infrared, visible lights, ultraviolet, x-
rays, and gamma rays.
Infrared Radiation
 Began in 1800
 Sir William Herschel ( discover of the planet Uranus)
Ultraviolet Light
 Ultraviolet radiation, discovered in 1801 by J. Ritter
while he experimenting the chemicals
The Electromagnetic Spectrum I
• There is more to light than just the visible part of the spectrum
– Radio waves are very long wavelength photons (not sound!) with
wavelengths longer than a meter or so
– Microwaves (yes, the ones we cook with) are at the upper end of
the radio part of the spectrum
– Infrared wavelengths are just longer in wavelength than the
visible spectrum
 The Electromagnetic Spectrum II
• Above the visible…
– Ultraviolet waves are just shorter in wavelength than visible waves.
These are the waves that tan or burn us!
– X-rays come mostly from stellar sources, and can penetrate many
materials, like skin, muscle and bone
– Gamma rays have the shortest wavelength
Energy Carried by Photons
• A photon carries energy with it that is related to its wavelength or
frequency
• From this we see that long wavelength (low frequency) photons
carry less energy than short wavelength (high frequency) ones. This is
why UV waves give us a sunburn, and X-rays let us look through skin
and muscles!
h=Planck's constant = 6.626068 × 10-34 m2 kg / s
 Light and Color
 Human being can see colors ranging from deep red
through orange and yellow into green, blue and violet,
and we call these colors the visible spectrum.
 According to the wave theory, the color of light
determined by the light’s wavelength, which is the
spacing between wave crests.
 Nanometer a unit of length equal to 1 billionth of a meter
and abbreviated nm.
• Red colors refer to long wavelength of visible light.
• Blue color refer to short wavelengths.
• Frequency is the number of wave crests that pass a given
point in 1 second.
• The sun when it is seen high in the sky and an ordinary
bulb appear to have no dominant color. Light from such
source is called white light.
Radio Waves and Microwaves
 James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish physicist, predicted
the existence of radio waves in the mid-1800’s.
 Heinrich Hertz produced them experimentally in 1888
 Karl Jansky’s discovered naturally occurring radio
waves coming from cosmic sources.
 Jansky’s discover in 1930’s that the center of the
Milky Way was a strong source of radio emission was
the birth of radio astronomy.
 Radio waves have length of 1 meter
X Rays and Gamma Rays
 X rays discovered by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895
Energy Carried by Electromagnetic Radiation
4.3 The Nature of matter and Heat
• Leucipus, who lived about the fifth century B.C. in
Greece, and his student Democritus taught that
matter was composed of tiny indivisible particles.
They called these particles atoms, which means
“uncuttable” in Greek.
• The attraction between the nucleus of one atom and
the electrons of a neighbouring atom also can link
atoms together to form molecules.
The kelvin Temperature Scale
• English physicist Lord Kelvin
Formula
F = 9/5 K – 459.4
• German physicist Wilhelm Wien (pronounced “veen”)
about 1900.
• Wien’s Law states that the wavelength (color) at which
an objects radiates most strongly is inversely
proportional to the object’s temperature.
• A blackbody is an object that absorbs all the
radiation falling upon on it.
•
 4.4 radiation from individual Atoms
• Chemical element is a substance composed only of
atoms that all have the same electrical charge in their
nucleus.
• An has a dense core called a nucleus around which
particles called electron orbit. The nucleus is in turn
composed of particles called protons and neutrons, the
protons have a positive charge, the neutrons have
negative charge.
• Isotopes have the same chemical properties, but
different mass.
 4.5 Formation of a Spectrum
• The technique use to capture and analyze such a
spectrum is called spectroscopy.
How a spectrum is form
• Scientist refer to the orbitals as energy level.
Types of Spectra
• The brightness of the emitted light changes smoothly
with wave-length all colors are present. We say such a
light has a continuous spectrum.
• Emission-line spectrum a spectrum consisting of
bright lines at certain wavelengths separated by dark
regions in which there is no light.
• Absorption line spectrum a spectrum showing dark
lines at some narrow color regions (wavelengths).
Seeing Spectra
• Seeing the Sun’s spectrum
requires a few special tools, but it
is
not difficult
– A narrow slit only lets a little
light into the experiment
– Either a grating or a prism splits
the light into its component colors
– If we look closely at the
Example spectrographs spectrum, we can see lines,
corresponding to wavelengths of
light that were absorbed.
 Types of Spectra

• Kirchoff’s Laws:
– If the source emits light that is
continuous, and all colors are present,
we say that this is a continuous
spectrum.
– If the molecules in the gas are well
separated and moving rapidly (have a
high temperature), the atoms will emit
characteristic frequencies of light.
This is an emission-line spectrum.
– If the molecules of gas are well
separated, but cool, they will absorb
light of a characteristic frequency as it
passes through. This is an absorption
line spectrum.
Spectra of Astronomical Objects
Emission Spectra
Imagine that we have a hot hydrogen
gas.
– Collisions among the hydrogen
atoms cause electrons to jump
up to higher orbitals, or energy
levels
– Collisions can also cause the
electrons to jump back to lower
levels, and emit a photon of energy
hc/λ
– If the electron falls from orbital 3
to orbital 2, the emitted photon will
have a wavelength of 656 nm
– If the electron falls from orbital 3
to orbital 2, the emitted photon will
have a wavelength of 486 nm
• We can monitor the gas, and count how many photons of each
wavelength we see. If we graph this data, we’ll see an emission
spectrum!
Emission spectrum of hydrogen • This spectrum is unique to
hydrogen
– Like a barcode!
• If we were looking at a hot
cloud of interstellar gas in
space, and saw these lines, we
would know the cloud was made
of hydrogen!
 Different atom, different
spectrum!
• Every element has its own
spectrum. Note the differences
between hydrogen and helium
spectra below.

Absorption Spectra
• What if, instead of hot hydrogen gas, we had a cloud of cool
hydrogen gas between us and a star?
– Photons of an energy that corresponds to the electronics
transitions in hydrogen will be absorbed
– The light from those photons
is effectively removed from the
spectrum
– The spectrum will have dark
lines where the missing light
would be
– This is an absorption
spectrum!
– Also like a barcode!
• The transparency of the atmosphere to visible light
compared to its opacity ( non-transparency ) to
infrared and ultraviolet radiation creates what is
called an atmospheric window.
4.6 The Doppler Shift: Detecting Motion
• This change of wavelength caused by motion is called
the Doppler Shift, and it is a powerful tool for
measuring the speed and direction of motion of
astronomical objects.