• Question: Why do we need to see the light that explosions create?

    Asked by Kim with cookies :-) to Stephen on 8 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Stephen Davitt

      Stephen Davitt answered on 8 Nov 2016:

      Well the explosions I create hold a lot of information about the sample the explosion came from. Mainly what I look for is what colours of light or ‘wavelengths’ are present, and we can do this with a device called a spectrometer.

      Every type of atom has a certain set of colours it releases during the explosion, so we can think of them like fingerprints, when we look at the colours it’s like looking for which fingerprints are there. So when I look at the light from the explosions it allows us to tell which atoms are inside of it. Think of it like looking at the recipe of what a sample is made of.

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