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Electromagnetic Waves have different wavelengths

When you listen to the

radio, watch TV, or cook
dinner in a microwave
oven, you are using
electromagnetic waves.

Radio waves, television waves, and

microwaves are all types of electromagnetic
waves. They differ from each other in
wavelength. Wavelength is the distance
between one wave crest to the next.
Waves in the electromagnetic spectrum vary in size from very long radio waves the size of buildings, to very short gamma-rays smaller
than the size of the nucleus of an atom.

Did you know that electromagnetic waves can not only be described by their wavelength, but also by their energy and frequency? All three
of these things are related to each other mathematically. This means that it is correct to talk about the energy of an X-ray or the wavelength
of a microwave or the frequency of a radio wave. The electromagnetic spectrum includes, from longest wavelength to shortest: radio
waves, microwaves, infrared, optical, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma-rays.

To tour the electromagnetic spectrum, follow the links below!

RADIO WAVES | MICROWAVES | INFRARED | VISIBLE LIGHT | ULTRAVIOLET | X-RAYS | GAMMA RAYS

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RETURN TO THE ELECTROMAGNETIC SPECTRUM

Electromagnetic spectrum
by Chris Woodford. Last updated: March 12, 2017.

Y ou might think the world is essentially what you can see in front of you, but think for

a moment and you'll realize this isn't true. When you close your eyes, the world doesn't cease to
exist just because there's no light to see by. If you were a rattlesnake or an owl, you could see
perfectly well by night. Thinking more laterally, what if you were a radar set mounted on an
airplane? Then you could help pilots see in darkness or bad weather by detecting reflected radio
waves. And if you were a camera sensitive to X rays, you could even see through bodies or
buildings! The light we can see is only one part of all the electrical and magnetic energy buzzing
around our world. Radio waves, X rays, gamma rays, and microwaves work in a very similar
way. All together, this energy is called the electromagnetic spectrum. Let's take a closer look at
what that means!

Photo: Water drops bend (or refract) short wavelength blue light more than long-wavelength red light, which is why
rainbows arc across the sky when sunlight streams through rain, making a rainbow and revealing the spectrum "hidden"
inside white light.

What is electromagnetic radiation?

Light waves and other types of energy that radiate (travel out) from where they're produced are
called electromagnetic radiation. Together, they make up what's known as the electromagnetic
spectrum. Our eyes can see only a limited part of the electromagnetic spectrum—the colorful
rainbow we see on sunny-rainy days, which is an incredibly tiny part of all the electromagnetic
radiation that zaps through our world. We call the energy we can see visible light (we discuss it
in detail in our main article on light) and, like radio waves, microwaves, and all the rest, it's
made up of electromagnetic waves. These are up-and-down, wave-shaped patterns
ofelectricity and magnetism that race along at right angles to one another, at the speed of light
(300,000 km per second or 186,000 miles per second, which is fast enough to go 400 times round
the world in a minute!). The light we can see stretches in a spectrum from red (the lowest
frequency and longest wavelength of light our eyes can register) through orange, yellow, green,
blue, and indigo to violet (the highest frequency and shortest wavelength we can see).

Artwork: How an electromagnetic wave travels: If we could peer inside a light ray (or other electromagnetic wave), this is
what we'd see: an electrical wave vibrating in one direction (blue in this case, and vibrating up-and-down) and a
magnetic wave vibrating at right angles to it (red in this case, and vibrating from side to side). The two waves vibrate in
perfect step, at right angles to the direction they're traveling in. This diagram shows us something scientists only really
understood in the 19th century: electricity and magnetism are equal partners that work together closely at all times.

What kinds of energy make up the electromagnetic

spectrum?
What are the other kinds of electromagnetic radiation that objects give off? Here are a few of
them, ranged in order from the longest wavelength to the shortest. Note that these are not really
definite bands with hard edges: they blur into one another with some overlap between them.

 Radio waves: If our eyes could see radio waves, we could (in theory)
watch TV programs just by staring at the sky! Well not really, but it's a nice
idea. Typical size: 30cm–500m. Radio waves cover a huge band of
frequencies, and their wavelengths vary from tens of centimeters for high-
frequency waves to hundreds of meters (the length of an athletics track) for
 lower-frequency ones. That's simply because any electromagnetic wave longer
than a microwave is called a radio wave.

 Microwaves: Obviously used for cooking in microwave ovens, but also for
transmitting information in radar equipment. Microwaves are like short-
wavelength radio waves. Typical size: 15cm (the length of a pencil).

 Infrared: Just beyond the reddest light we can see, with a slightly shorter
frequency, there's a kind of invisible "hot light" called infrared. Although we
can't see it, we can feel it warming our skin when it hits our face—it's what we
think of as radiated heat. If, like rattlesnakes, we could see infrared radiation, it
would be a bit like having night-vision lenses built into our heads. Typical size:
0.01mm (the length of a cell).

 Visible light: The light we can actually see is just a tiny slice in the middle of
the spectrum.

 Ultraviolet: This is a kind of blue-ish light just beyond the highest-frequency

violet light our eyes can detect. The Sun transmits powerful ultraviolet
radiation that we can't see: that's why you can get sunburned even when
you're swimming in the sea or on cloudy days—and why sunscreen is so
important. Typical size: 500 nanometers (the width of a typical bacteria).

 X rays: A very useful type of high-energy wave widely used in medicine and
security. Find out more in our main article on X rays. Typical size: 0.1
nanometers (the width of an atom).

 Gamma rays: These are the most energetic and dangerous form of
electromagnetic waves. Gamma rays are a type of harmful radiation. Typical
size: 0.000001 nanometers (the width of an atomic nucleus).

Photo: The Sun looks the way it does because our eyes see only a fraction of the electromagnetic radiation it gives off. If
we could see X rays, the Sun might look more like it does in this image taken by the Soft X ray Telescope (SXT). What does
the Sun really look like? We can never know: our eyes can't appreciate it completely! Photo by courtesy of NASA Goddard
Space Flight Center (NASA-GSFC).

The electromagnetic spectrum

All the different kinds of electromagnetic radiation are essentially the same "stuff" as light:
they're forms of energy that travel in straight lines, at the speed of light (300,000 km or 186,000
miles per second), when electrical and magnetic vibrations wiggle from side to side. Together,
we refer to these forms of energy as the electromagnetic spectrum. You can think of it as a kind
of super-big spectrum that stretches either side of the smaller spectrum we can actually see (the
rainbow of light colors).

There are lots of images of the electromagnetic spectrum available online, so we won't bothering
drawing it out for you again. Click the small image on the right to see quite a nice diagram of the
spectrum from NASA.

Photo: Diagram of electromagnetic spectrum courtesy of NASA.

Who discovered the electromagnetic spectrum?

Up until the 19th century, scientists thought electricity and magnetism were completely separate
things. Then, following a series of amazing experiments, it became clear that they were linked
together very closely. Electricity could cause magnetism and vice-versa! Around 1819/1820, a
Danish physicist called Hans Christian Oersted (1777–1851) showed that an electric wire would
create a pattern of magnetism around it. About a decade later, English chemist Michael Faraday
(1791–1867) proved that the opposite could happen too—you could use magnetism to generate
electricity—and that led him to develop the electric motors and electricity generators that now
power our world.

Thanks to the pioneering work of people like this, another great scientist, James Clerk Maxwell
(1831–1879) was able to come up with a single theory that explained both electricity and
magnetism. Maxwell summed up everything people had discovered in four simple equations to
produce a superb theory of electromagnetism, which he published in 1873. He realized that
electromagnetism could travel in the form of waves, at the speed of light, and concluded that
light itself had to be a kind of electromagnetic wave. About a decade after Maxwell's death, a
brilliant German physicist named Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894) became the first person to
produce electromagnetic waves in a laboratory. That piece of work led to the development
of radio, television, and—much more recently—things like wireless Internet.

Photo: James Clerk Maxwell: the father of electromagnetism. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

How can we "see" other parts of the spectrum?

Our eyes pick up light from just one tiny slice of the spectrum,
but the Universe is buzzing with other kinds of radiation. If we
want to "see" beyond the electromagnetic limits of our own
eyes, we can use telescopes "tuned" to higher or lower
wavelengths. Astronomers use all kinds of telescopes—some
on Earth, some in space—to glean information about distant
objects from the electromagnetic radiation they give off.

Radio waves

Giant satellite-dish antennas pick up long-wavelength, high-

frequency radio waves. The biggest radio telescope on Earth is
the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in
China, which is getting on for twice the size of the much better
known 305m (1000ft) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The
dish pictured here is about seven times smaller than FAST and
four times smaller than Arecibo. It's the 70m (230ft) Canberra
deep dish satellite in Australia.

Photo by courtesy of NASA on the Commons.

Microwaves

Because cosmic microwaves can't get through the whole of

Earth's atmosphere, we have to study them from
space. Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), launched in 1989
and deactivated in 1993, was a space satellite designed to do
this. These images of the night sky were taken by COBE using
different wavelengths of infrared light.

Photo by courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA-GSFC).

Infrared

Water in Earth's atmosphere absorbs infrared; studying that

kind of electromagnetic radiation is another job for a space-
based satellite, such as the Infrared Astronomical Satellite
(IRAS), which operated for 10 months during 1983. This is an
image of the Andromeda Galaxy taken by IRAS.

Photo by courtesy of NASA Ames Research Center (NASA-ARC).

Visible light
Visible light shooting in from space is one thing we can easily
study from Earth with any conventional, optical telescope. This
one is the historic 66cm (26inch) refractor telescope at
the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. However, Earth-
bound telescopes like this can pick up only so much—hence
the need for telescopes (like the Hubble and its replacement,
theJames Webb) that travel into space.

Photo by Seth Rossman courtesy of US Navy.

Ultraviolet light

Ultraviolet light can cause skin cancer, so it's a good job much
of it is absorbed by Earth's ozone layer. Unfortunately, the
downside of this is that we have to study ultraviolet light
coming from space using satellites such as the International
Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE), which operated for almost two
decades between 1978 and 1996.

Photo by courtesy of NASA Glenn Research Center (NASA-GRC).

X rays

Think of X rays and you probably think of broken bones—but

they're whizzing round space too. Earth's atmosphere prevents
these dangerous, high-energy rays from reaching telescopes
on the ground, but space telescopes, such as the Roentgen
Satellite (ROSAT)(which operated between 1990 and 1999),
have been able to observe them in space. This image of the
Sun was taken in December 2001 by the Soft X ray Telescope
(SXT), an instrument onboard the Yohkohobservatory
spacecraft.

Photo by courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA-GSFC).

Gamma rays
High-energy gamma rays are also blocked by Earth's
atmosphere, so we need space-based telescopes to study
those too, such as the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory,
which operated from 1991 to 2000. This photo shows the
Compton whizzing over Baja California, Mexico in 1991, and
was taken from the Space Shuttle that launched it). The
Compton was named for US physicist Arthur Holly
Compton (1892–1962), one of the first scientists to study
cosmic rays.

Photo by courtesy of NASA Johnson Space Center (NASA-JSC).

Electromagnetic Spectrum - Wavelength,

Frequency, And Energy, Wavelength
Regions
Tweet
light radiation visible wavelengths

The electromagnetic spectrum encompasses a continuous range of

frequencies or wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, ranging from long
wavelength, low energy radio waves to short wavelength, high frequency,
high-energy gamma rays. The electromagnetic spectrum is traditionally
divided into regions of radio waves, microwaves, infrared radiation,
visible light, ultraviolet rays, x rays, and gamma rays.

Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell's (1831–1879) development of a set of

equations that accurately described electromagnetic phenomena allowed the
mathematical and theoretical unification of electrical and magnetic
phenomena. When Maxwell's calculated speed of light fit well with
experimental determinations of the speed of light, Maxwell and other
physicists realized that visible light should be a part of a broader
electromagnetic spectrum containing forms of electromagnetic radiation that
varied from visible light only in terms of wavelength and wave frequency.
Frequency is defined as the number of wave cycles that pass a particular point
per unit time, and is commonly measured in Hertz (cycles per second).
Wavelength defines the distance between adjacent points of the
electromagnetic wave that are in equal phase (e.g., wavecrests).

Exploration of the electromagnetic spectrum quickly resulted practical

advances. German physicist Henrich Rudolph Hertz regarded Maxwell's
equations as a path to a "kingdom" or "great domain" of electromagnetic
waves. Based on this insight, in 1888, Hertz demonstrated the existence of
radio waves. A decade later, Wilhelm Röent gen's discovery of high-energy
electromagnetic radiation in the form of x rays quickly found practical medical
use.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, German physicist, Maxwell Planck,

proposed that atoms absorb or emit electromagnetic radiation only in certain
bundles termed quanta. In his work on the photoelectric effect, German-
born American physicist Albert Einstein used the term photon to describe
these electromagnetic quanta. Planck determined that energy of light was
proportional to its frequency (i.e., as the frequency of light increases, so does
the energy of the light). Planck's constant, h = 6.626 × 10−34 joule-second in
the meter-kilogram-second system (4.136 × 10−15 eV-sec), relates the energy of
a photon to the frequency of the electromagnetic wave and allows a precise
calculation of the energy of electromagnetic radiation in all portions of the
electromagnetic spectrum.

Although electromagnetic radiation is now understood as having both photon

(particle) and wave-like properties, descriptions of the electromagnetic
spectrum generally utilize traditional wave-related terminology (i.e.,
frequency and wavelength).

Electromagnetic fields and photons exert forces that can excite electrons. As
electrons transition between allowed orbitals, energy must be conserved. This
conservation is achieved by the emission of photons when
an electron moves from a higher potential orbital energy to a lower potential
orbital energy. Accordingly, light is emitted only at certain frequencies
characteristic of every atom and molecule. Correspondingly, atoms and
molecules absorb only a limited range of frequencies and wavelengths of the
electromagnetic spectrum, and reflect all the other frequencies and
wavelengths of light. These reflected frequencies and wavelengths are often
the actual observed light or colors associated with an object.

The region of the electromagnetic spectrum that contains light at frequencies

and wavelengths that stimulate the rod and cones in the human eye is termed
the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Color is the association
the eye makes with selected portions of that visible region (i.e., particular
colors are associated with specific wavelengths of visible light). A nanometer
(10−9 m) is the most common unit used for characterizing the wavelength of
visible light. Using this unit, the visible portion of the electromagnetic
spectrum is located between 380 nm–750 nm and the component color
regions of the visible spectrum are Red (670–770 nm), Orange (592–620 nm),
Yellow (578–592 nm), Green (500–578 nm), Blue (464–500 nm), Indigo
(444–464 nm), and Violet

TABLE 1

Region Frequency (Hz) Wavelength (m) Energy (eV) Size Scale

Radio waves < 109 > 0.3 < 7x 10-7 Mountains, building

Microwaves 109 - 3x1011 0.001 - 0.3 7x10-7 - 2x10-4

Infrared 3x1011 - 3.9x1014 7.6x10-7 - 0.001 2x10-4 - 0.3

Visible 3.9x1014 - 7.9x1014 3.8x10-7 - 7.6x10-7 0.3 - 0.5 Bacteria

Ultraviolet 7.9x1014 - 3.4x1016 8x10-9 - 3.8x10-7 0.5 - 20 Viruses

X-rays 3.4x1016 - 5x1019 6x10-12 - 8x10-9 20 - 3x10 4 Atoms

Gamma Rays > 5x1019 < 6x10-12 > 3x104 Nuclei

TABLE 2

Red 6300 - 7600 Å

Orange 5900 - 6300 Å

Yellow 5600 - 5900 Å

Green 4900 - 5600 Å

Blue 4500 - 4900 Å

(400–446 nm). Because the energy of electromagnetic radiation (i.e., the

photon) is inversely proportional to the wavelength, red light (longest in
wavelength) is the lowest in energy. As wavelengths contract toward the blue
end of the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum, the frequencies and
energies of colors steadily increase.

Like colors in the visible spectrum, other regions in the electromagnetic

spectrum have distinct and important components. Radio waves, with
wavelengths that range from hundreds of meters to less than a centimeter,
transmit radio and television signals. Within the radio band, FM radio waves
have a shorter wavelength and higher frequency than AM radio waves. Still
higher frequency radio waves with wavelengths of a few centimeters can be
utilized for RADAR imaging.

Microwaves range from approximately 1 ft (30 cm) in length to the thickness

of a piece of paper. The atoms in food placed in a microwave oven become
agitated (heated) by exposure to microwave radiation. Infrared radiation
comprises the region of the electromagnetic spectrum where the wavelength of
light is measured region from one millimeter (in wavelength) down to 400
nm. Infrared waves are discernible to humans as thermal radiation (heat).
Just above the visible spectrum in terms of higher energy, higher frequency
and shorter wavelengths is the ultraviolet region of the spectrum with light
ranging in wavelength from 400 to 10 billionths of a meter. Ultraviolet
radiation is a common cause of sunburn even when visible light is obscured or
blocked by clouds. X rays are a highly energetic region of electromagnetic
radiation with wavelengths ranging from about ten billionths of a meter to 10
trillionths of a meter. The ability of x rays to penetrate skin and other
substances renders them useful in both medical and industrial radiography.
Gamma rays, the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation, are
comprised of light with wavelengths of less than about ten trillionths of a
meter and include waves with wavelengths smaller than the radius of an
atomic nucleus (1015 m). Gamma rays are generated by nuclear reactions
(e.g., radioactive decay, nuclear explosions, etc.).

Cosmic rays are not a part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Cosmic rays are
not a form of electromagnetic radiation, but are actually high-energy charged
particles with energies similar to, or higher than, observed gamma
electromagnetic radiation energies.