10 most difficult light riddles

A rainbow is a meteorological phenomenon that is caused by reflection, refraction and dispersion of light in water droplets resulting in a spectrum of light appearing in the sky. It takes the form of a multicoloured circular arc. Rainbows caused by sunlight always appear in the section of sky directly opposite the sun.

A quasar is an extremely energetic source of radiation powered by accretion disc around galaxy's central supermassive black hole. Quasars were much more common in the early universe, as all known quasars are extremely distant.

Rayleigh scattering, named after the British physicist Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt), is an elastic scattering of light or other electromagnetic radiation by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the radiation.

Sound travels through air at 331.2 meters per second, so after 3 seconds it would travel approximately 1 kilometer.

A terminator or twilight zone is a moving line that divides the daylit side and the dark night side of a planetary body. A terminator is defined as the locus of points on a planet or moon where the line through its parent star is tangent. An observer on the terminator of such an orbiting body with an atmosphere would experience twilight due to light scattering by particles in the gaseous layer.

The speed at which light propagates through transparent materials, such as glass or air, is less than c. However, this "slowing of the light" is only due to the fact of photos being absorbed and re-emitted after a slight delay between atoms. When a photon is emitted, it's speed is always c. In exotic materials like Bose–Einstein condensates near absolute zero, the effective speed of light may be only a few metres per second.

Albedo in Latin is simply "whiteness". It is the reflecting power of a surface - the ratio of reflected radiation from the surface to incident radiation upon it.

The Sun is a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, with internal convective motion that generates a magnetic field via a dynamo process. Hot plasmas (thermal plasmas) have electrons and the heavy particles at the same temperature, i.e. they are in thermal equilibrium with each other. Cold plasmas (nonthermal plasmas) on the other hand have the ions and neutrals at a much lower temperature, whereas electrons are much "hotter".

Supernovae are extremely luminous and often briefly outshine an entire galaxy. No supernova has been observed in the Milky Way since 1604, but they are often observed in distant galaxies.

UV radiation was discovered in 1801 when the German physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter observed that invisible rays just beyond the violet end of the visible spectrum darkened silver chloride-soaked paper more quickly than violet light itself.