I was just thinking about how amazing rainbows are and how lucky we are that we can see them. But I was also wondering if other animals or hypothetical aliens that can see different spectra of light can also see something in the sky or is it just coincidentally just visible light?
In: Biology
Not only is this true, as others have said, but this is basically how we discovered the existence of non-visible light! After Newton, lots of other scientists started experimenting with prisms, and one guy (William Herschel, same guy who discovered Uranus) decided to see how fast the different colors made the temperature rise, and he found that going just past red there was still something there causing a rise; he experimented and discovered you could reflect it and decided there was invisible light there. It was below red, so he called it “infrared” light.
About a year after this, Johann Ritter–figuring there might be invisible light at the other end of the spectrum–discovered that yes, just above violet, there was a kind of light that could affect chemical reactions. As it was above violet, he dubbed it “ultraviolet” light.
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