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Electromagnetic Spectrum
Electromagnetic Spectrum
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Did you know that electromagnetic waves can not only be described by their wavelength, but also by their energy and frequency? All three
of these things are related to each other mathematically. This means that it is correct to talk about the energy of an X-ray or the wavelength
of a microwave or the frequency of a radio wave. The electromagnetic spectrum includes, from longest wavelength to shortest: radio
waves, microwaves, infrared, optical, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma-rays.
RADIO WAVES | MICROWAVES | INFRARED | VISIBLE LIGHT | ULTRAVIOLET | X-RAYS | GAMMA RAYS
Y ou might think the world is essentially what you can see in front of you, but think for
a moment and you'll realize this isn't true. When you close your eyes, the world doesn't cease to
exist just because there's no light to see by. If you were a rattlesnake or an owl, you could see
perfectly well by night. Thinking more laterally, what if you were a radar set mounted on an
airplane? Then you could help pilots see in darkness or bad weather by detecting reflected radio
waves. And if you were a camera sensitive to X rays, you could even see through bodies or
buildings! The light we can see is only one part of all the electrical and magnetic energy buzzing
around our world. Radio waves, X rays, gamma rays, and microwaves work in a very similar
way. All together, this energy is called the electromagnetic spectrum. Let's take a closer look at
what that means!
Photo: Water drops bend (or refract) short wavelength blue light more than long-wavelength red light, which is why
rainbows arc across the sky when sunlight streams through rain, making a rainbow and revealing the spectrum "hidden"
inside white light.
Artwork: How an electromagnetic wave travels: If we could peer inside a light ray (or other electromagnetic wave), this is
what we'd see: an electrical wave vibrating in one direction (blue in this case, and vibrating up-and-down) and a
magnetic wave vibrating at right angles to it (red in this case, and vibrating from side to side). The two waves vibrate in
perfect step, at right angles to the direction they're traveling in. This diagram shows us something scientists only really
understood in the 19th century: electricity and magnetism are equal partners that work together closely at all times.
Radio waves: If our eyes could see radio waves, we could (in theory)
watch TV programs just by staring at the sky! Well not really, but it's a nice
idea. Typical size: 30cm–500m. Radio waves cover a huge band of
frequencies, and their wavelengths vary from tens of centimeters for high-
frequency waves to hundreds of meters (the length of an athletics track) for
lower-frequency ones. That's simply because any electromagnetic wave longer
than a microwave is called a radio wave.
Microwaves: Obviously used for cooking in microwave ovens, but also for
transmitting information in radar equipment. Microwaves are like short-
wavelength radio waves. Typical size: 15cm (the length of a pencil).
Infrared: Just beyond the reddest light we can see, with a slightly shorter
frequency, there's a kind of invisible "hot light" called infrared. Although we
can't see it, we can feel it warming our skin when it hits our face—it's what we
think of as radiated heat. If, like rattlesnakes, we could see infrared radiation, it
would be a bit like having night-vision lenses built into our heads. Typical size:
0.01mm (the length of a cell).
Visible light: The light we can actually see is just a tiny slice in the middle of
the spectrum.
X rays: A very useful type of high-energy wave widely used in medicine and
security. Find out more in our main article on X rays. Typical size: 0.1
nanometers (the width of an atom).
Gamma rays: These are the most energetic and dangerous form of
electromagnetic waves. Gamma rays are a type of harmful radiation. Typical
size: 0.000001 nanometers (the width of an atomic nucleus).
Photo: The Sun looks the way it does because our eyes see only a fraction of the electromagnetic radiation it gives off. If
we could see X rays, the Sun might look more like it does in this image taken by the Soft X ray Telescope (SXT). What does
the Sun really look like? We can never know: our eyes can't appreciate it completely! Photo by courtesy of NASA Goddard
Space Flight Center (NASA-GSFC).
There are lots of images of the electromagnetic spectrum available online, so we won't bothering
drawing it out for you again. Click the small image on the right to see quite a nice diagram of the
spectrum from NASA.
Thanks to the pioneering work of people like this, another great scientist, James Clerk Maxwell
(1831–1879) was able to come up with a single theory that explained both electricity and
magnetism. Maxwell summed up everything people had discovered in four simple equations to
produce a superb theory of electromagnetism, which he published in 1873. He realized that
electromagnetism could travel in the form of waves, at the speed of light, and concluded that
light itself had to be a kind of electromagnetic wave. About a decade after Maxwell's death, a
brilliant German physicist named Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894) became the first person to
produce electromagnetic waves in a laboratory. That piece of work led to the development
of radio, television, and—much more recently—things like wireless Internet.
Photo: James Clerk Maxwell: the father of electromagnetism. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Our eyes pick up light from just one tiny slice of the spectrum,
but the Universe is buzzing with other kinds of radiation. If we
want to "see" beyond the electromagnetic limits of our own
eyes, we can use telescopes "tuned" to higher or lower
wavelengths. Astronomers use all kinds of telescopes—some
on Earth, some in space—to glean information about distant
objects from the electromagnetic radiation they give off.
Radio waves
Microwaves
Infrared
Visible light
Visible light shooting in from space is one thing we can easily
study from Earth with any conventional, optical telescope. This
one is the historic 66cm (26inch) refractor telescope at
the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. However, Earth-
bound telescopes like this can pick up only so much—hence
the need for telescopes (like the Hubble and its replacement,
theJames Webb) that travel into space.
Ultraviolet light
Ultraviolet light can cause skin cancer, so it's a good job much
of it is absorbed by Earth's ozone layer. Unfortunately, the
downside of this is that we have to study ultraviolet light
coming from space using satellites such as the International
Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE), which operated for almost two
decades between 1978 and 1996.
Gamma rays
High-energy gamma rays are also blocked by Earth's
atmosphere, so we need space-based telescopes to study
those too, such as the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory,
which operated from 1991 to 2000. This photo shows the
Compton whizzing over Baja California, Mexico in 1991, and
was taken from the Space Shuttle that launched it). The
Compton was named for US physicist Arthur Holly
Compton (1892–1962), one of the first scientists to study
cosmic rays.
Electromagnetic fields and photons exert forces that can excite electrons. As
electrons transition between allowed orbitals, energy must be conserved. This
conservation is achieved by the emission of photons when
an electron moves from a higher potential orbital energy to a lower potential
orbital energy. Accordingly, light is emitted only at certain frequencies
characteristic of every atom and molecule. Correspondingly, atoms and
molecules absorb only a limited range of frequencies and wavelengths of the
electromagnetic spectrum, and reflect all the other frequencies and
wavelengths of light. These reflected frequencies and wavelengths are often
the actual observed light or colors associated with an object.
TABLE 1
Radio waves < 109 > 0.3 < 7x 10-7 Mountains, building
TABLE 2
Cosmic rays are not a part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Cosmic rays are
not a form of electromagnetic radiation, but are actually high-energy charged
particles with energies similar to, or higher than, observed gamma
electromagnetic radiation energies.