Dispersion in Wavelength |
In the preceding section we showed that light is refracted at the boundary between two media differing in density. Let us now examine more carefully the factors upon which this refraction depends.
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Light separated into its freqency (and therefore energy or wavelength)
components is called a spectrum of light.
Spectrographs
A spectrograph is
a refined instrument that produces a spectrum from a source of light.
Although a prism can disperse light according to color, in modern
spectrographs it is more common to accomplish the same task by using a
diffraction grating.
The diffraction grating works on a completely different principle (diffraction
rather than refraction) but it also can separate light spatially according to
wavelength. We will see in subsequent sections that the spectrograph is a
central tool of modern astronomy.