University of Medicine and Health Sciences Light and Electromagentics Spectrum Worksheets

• Place the following electromagnetic waves in order from shortest wavelength to longest wavelength:
• Place the following electromagnetic waves in order from lowest energy to highest energy:
• Use the speed of light to determine the frequency of an electromagnetic wave that has a wavelength of 0.4 meters (show your work and your calculation).
• Jupiter is approximately 5 times farther away from the Sun than Earth is. If you were on Jupiter and you looked back at the Sun, how would its brightness compare to its brightness on Earth? (show your work and your calculation).
• Light gets dimmer as you get farther away from a source according to the inverse square law (like in the previous question). Why do you think it is so challenging for astronomers to view stars and galaxies that are millions or billions of light years away from Earth?
• Which types of telescopes would be used to look for high energy wavelengths and which types of telescopes would be used to look for low energy wavelengths?
• Look at the gamma ray image above. Where in the galaxy do you see the highest energy radiation (shown in red) coming from?
• The top image below shows the emission line spectrum for hydrogen. The absorption spectrum of a star is shown in the bottom image.
• Consider the same spectra above. What could you infer about the star’s motion? Explain.
• Consider the images below for these different stars. Carefully look at the colors of these stars. Which star has the highest temperature and which star has the lowest temperature? Justify your answer.

microwaves, red light, violet light, radio waves, x-rays, gamma rays, infrared

gamma-rays, X-rays, violet light, red light, infrared, microwaves and radio waves

microwaves, red light, violet light, radio waves, x-rays, gamma rays, infrared

Because light gets blocked and scattered by dust and gas, it is sometimes helpful to look at the same object in different frequencies. Look at these images above. Each of these images is a picture of our Milky Way galaxy; we will see later that we are just one star in a group of billions. This is like being one tree in a forest and looking at the entire forest surrounding us. These are the same pictures of the Milky Way, but they are taken at different wavelengths.

If you saw these two spectra side-by-side, what could you infer about the star’s chemical makeup? Explain.