BBC Sky at Night

The electromagnetic spectrum

EXPLAINER

The fundamentals of astronomy for beginners

When we think about light, most people only think in terms of what our eyes can see. But this ‘visible’ light is just a fraction of the light, or electromagnetic radiation, suffusing the cosmos. The entire range of this radiation is called the electromagnetic, or EM, spectrum.

Electromagnetic radiation is described as a stream of massless particles, called photons,

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