What happens when sunlight shines through rain?
When sunlight passes through rain, it creates one of nature’s most stunning displays: a rainbow.
What happens when sunlight shines through rain?
When sunlight passes through rain, it creates one of nature’s most stunning displays: a rainbow.
This beautiful phenomenon occurs as sunlight interacts with raindrops in the atmosphere, producing a range of colors that brighten the sky after rainfall.

A rainbow is formed through three main processes: refraction, reflection, and dispersion.
Refraction:
As sunlight enters a raindrop, the light slows down and changes direction slightly. This change occurs because light moves at different speeds in air and water, and when it enters the water droplet, it is refracted.
Reflection:
Once inside the raindrop, the light reflects off the back of the drop, changing direction again and moving back toward the air.
Dispersion:
As the light exits the raindrop, it spreads out, and the different colors within the light become visible. This separation of light into different colors, such as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, happens because each color travels at a slightly different angle through the water.
The interaction of millions of tiny raindrops refracting and reflecting light creates the rainbow that we see in the sky.
From the ground, rainbows usually appear as arcs, but in higher positions, like from an airplane, they can be seen as full circles.
The different colors are seen because light exits each raindrop at slightly different angles, with red light exiting at a higher angle than violet light. This causes red to appear at the top of the rainbow and violet at the bottom.
In rare instances, double rainbows can occur when light reflects twice within the raindrop before emerging.
In these cases, the second arc appears above the primary rainbow, and the order of the colors is reversed, with red on the inside and violet on the outside.
Well, taking it at face value I would say the destruction of the entire universe. This raindrop has greater energy (and mass) than the entirety of the universe and will trigger total collapse of everything reversing the accelerating expansion leading over time to the entire universe returning to a singularity.
Obviously this goes beyond the bounds of known physics so we don’t really know any details, just the end of everything one way or another. We don’t really know how long this would take but we wouldn’t be around anyway.
Conclusion
The idea of a raindrop with more energy and mass than the entire universe suggests a dramatic shift in how the universe operates.
Although this concept exceeds current scientific understanding, it points to the significant impact such a raindrop could have, possibly reversing the universe’s expansion and causing everything to come together over time.
While the exact details and timeline are uncertain, this notion highlights the complexity of the universe and the limits of our current knowledge about cosmic events.
메타데이터
- post_id
- 0f58881c8f7f
- slug
- what-happens-when-sunlight-shines-through-rain-0f58881c8f7f
- url
- https://medium.com/@jmaha9372/what-happens-when-sunlight-shines-through-rain-0f58881c8f7f
- canonical_url
- https://medium.com/@jmaha9372/what-happens-when-sunlight-shines-through-rain-0f58881c8f7f
- author_url
- https://medium.com/@jmaha9372
- status
- ok
- fetched_at
- 2026-07-24 08:12:30