Question: What is spectroscopy?

Stephen Davitt answered on 14 Nov 2016:

Spectroscopy is the study of light, in particular what colours or ‘wavelengths’ of light are there and how strong each colour is!

Atoms all have different colours they give off when excited and each set of colours is unique to each atom, so they are like fingerprints!

If we use spectroscopy to see what colours are there and what intensities we actually can tell what atoms a sample is made of and roughly how much of each atom!

In this video I made for a competition you can see the basic idea