SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
UCSD Reveals Surprise About Rainbows
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
It's been said that if you truly want to learn about nature, you must speak the language. That language is physics, as University of California San Diego researchers learned while making a discovery about the essence of rainbows.
Computer scientist Henrik Wann Jensen, whose work in graphics earned him an Academy Award, teamed with student Iman Sadeghi to create simulations of the full spectrum of rainbows. They're trying to better depict rainbows in animated movies and video games. Things were going fine until they realized that not all types of rainbows arise from circular drops of water, as commonly believed. They were unable to correctly replicate "twinned" systems, or rainbows that have an arm that splits off from the main bow.
It's well known that rainbows are caused by the way that sunlight is bent and redirected inside of a raindrop. The assumption was that pretty much all raindrops handled sunlight in the same way. But that's not true.
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