Continuous spectrum.
The value of stellar spectra
When Newton described the laws of refraction and dispersion in optics, and observed the solar spectrum, all he could see was a continuous band of colors. If the spectrum of the white light from the Sun and stars were simply a continuous rainbow of colors, astronomers would have little interest in the detailed study of a star’s spectrum once they had learned its average surface temperature. In 1802, however, William Wollaston built an improved spectrometer that included a lens to focus the Sun’s spectrum on a screen. With this device, Wollaston saw that the colors were not spread out uniformly, but instead, some ranges of color were missing, appearing as dark bands in the solar spectrum. He mistakenly attributed these lines to natural boundaries between the colors. In 1815, German physicist Joseph Fraunhofer , upon a more careful examination of the solar spectrum, found about 600 such dark lines (missing colors), which led scientists to rule out the boundary hypothesis ( [link] ).
Visible spectrum of the sun.
Later, researchers found that similar dark lines could be produced in the spectra (“spectra” is the plural of “spectrum”) of artificial light sources. They did this by passing their light through various apparently transparent substances—usually containers with just a bit of thin gas in them.
These gases turned out not to be transparent at all colors: they were quite opaque at a few sharply defined wavelengths. Something in each gas had to be absorbing just a few colors of light and no others. All gases did this, but each different element absorbed a different set of colors and thus showed different dark lines. If the gas in a container consisted of two elements, then light passing through it was missing the colors (showing dark lines) for both of the elements. So it became clear that certain lines in the spectrum “go with” certain elements. This discovery was one of the most important steps forward in the history of astronomy.
What would happen if there were no continuous spectrum for our gases to remove light from? What if, instead, we heated the same thin gases until they were hot enough to glow with their own light? When the gases were heated, a spectrometer revealed no continuous spectrum, but several separate bright lines. That is, these hot gases emitted light only at certain specific wavelengths or colors.
When the gas was pure hydrogen, it would emit one pattern of colors; when it was pure sodium, it would emit a different pattern. A mixture of hydrogen and sodium emitted both sets of spectral lines. The colors the gases emitted when they were heated were the very same colors as those they had absorbed when a continuous source of light was behind them. From such experiments, scientists began to see that different substances showed distinctive spectral signatures by which their presence could be detected ( [link] ). Just as your signature allows the bank to identify you, the unique pattern of colors for each type of atom (its spectrum) can help us identify which element or elements are in a gas.