You are using a small telescope to view two closely spaced light bulbs located a mile away. Each light bulb is emitting blue light. At this distance, the light bulbs are still too close together for you to distinguish them as separate bulbs. If they were emitting red light instead, would you have a better or worse chance of distinguishing them as separate bulbs?

Question

Physics

Bryant Martinez

4 January, 14:01

You are using a small telescope to view two closely spaced light bulbs located a mile away. Each light bulb is emitting blue light. At this distance, the light bulbs are still too close together for you to distinguish them as separate bulbs. If they were emitting red light instead, would you have a better or worse chance of distinguishing them as separate bulbs?

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Roman Newton · Answer 1

The problem is based on resolving power of instruments. Resolving power of instruments is related to wavelength of light as follows

resolving power of telescope ∝ 1 / λ

Higher the resolving power closer the object that can be looked separately.

Wave length of blue light is shorter than that of red light so resolving power in case of blue light will be higher. So we have better chance of distinguishing separate bulbs when color light is blue.