how do rainbows stay for so long if the rain had stopped and more importantly how do they happen if the drop fall
In: Chemistry
Rainbows are cones.
Like an old-fashioned megaphone – a cone with you (or your eyes) at the point of it, with the centre-line of the cone extending back through your head to the Sun.
When you see a rainbow you are seeing light from the Sun being bounced off water droplets (from rain or something else) in that cone. So even if you see a complete “bow”, different parts of that bow may be miles away from each other, some far closer than others.
As for why we get them even if the drops fall, it is kind of like how computer or TV screens work; even though they are made up of lots of tiny pixels, our eyes cannot tell apart the different pixels (unless we look really close) so we see a single continuous image.
With rainbows we are seeing a “pixel” of colour from each water droplet, and the whole bow is made up of lots of these dots of light from many, many water droplets – but because our eyes cannot tell one droplet from the next they blur into one.
Sure, the droplets are falling, but that doesn’t matter as there will always be another droplet right behind it – kind of like how we can see waterfalls; each individual bit of water is moving but there is another bit of water right behind it, taking its place.
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