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This is the spectrum of a blue sky somewhat close to the horizon, looking east with the sun to the west at around 3–4 pm on a clear day. A spectral line is a weaker or stronger region in an otherwise uniform and continuous spectrum. It may result from emission or absorption of light in a narrow frequency range, compared with the nearby ...
The spectrum appears in a series of lines called the line spectrum. This line spectrum is called an atomic spectrum when it originates from an atom in elemental form. Each element has a different atomic spectrum. The production of line spectra by the atoms of an element indicate that an atom can radiate only a certain amount of energy.
The "visible" hydrogen emission spectrum lines in the Balmer series. H-alpha is the red line at the right. Four lines (counting from the right) are formally in the visible range. Lines five and six can be seen with the naked eye, but are considered to be ultraviolet as they have wavelengths less than 400 nm.
About 45 years later, Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen [7] noticed that several Fraunhofer lines coincide with characteristic emission lines identified in the spectra of heated chemical elements. [8] They inferred that dark lines in the solar spectrum are caused by absorption by chemical elements in the solar atmosphere. [9]
Each element has its own unique spectral line due to the fact that each element has a different atomic arrangement, so this method is an important tool for identifying the makeup of materials. Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff were the first to establish atomic emission spectroscopy as a tool in chemistry.
The classical example of a discrete spectrum (for which the term was first used) is the characteristic set of discrete spectral lines seen in the emission spectrum and absorption spectrum of isolated atoms of a chemical element, which only absorb and emit light at particular wavelengths.
Each element that is diffracted by a prism-like instrument displays either an absorption spectrum or an emission spectrum depending upon whether the element is being cooled or heated. [7] Until recently all spectroscopy involved the study of line spectra and most spectroscopy still does. [8]
Emission spectrum of a fluorescent light, exhibiting many spectral lines. Each line corresponds to an energy level in one of the elements inside the light. A spectral line can result from an electron transition in an atom, molecule or ion, which is associated with a specific amount of energy, E. When this energy is measured by means of some ...