What are Emission Lines?

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What are Emission Lines?

Inside a spectrometer, a beam of white light (typical incandescent light bulb, sunlight, etc.) is broken into its actual wavelengths, what we call colors. Radio waves, if we could see them like this, would glow way off the chart to the left. Infrared light would be glowing next to the red, between radio and white visible light.

Credit: B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

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The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the U.S. National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
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