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Ch.18 - Chemistry of the Environment

Chapter 18, Problem 21a

The wavelength at which the O2 molecule most strongly absorbs light is approximately 145 nm. (a) In which region of the electromagnetic spectrum does this light fall?

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Hey everyone in this example, we're told that a molecule of carbon dioxide absorbs light with a wavelength of 15 μm. We need to figure out where the light lies on the electromagnetic spectrum. So we're gonna take our units 15 micrometers. And we want to recall that wavelength represented by lambda here is in units of meters. So we're going to convert from micrometers to meters. And we should recall that our prefix micro tells us that we have 10 to the negative six power meters for one micrometer. We're now able to cancel out micro meters, leaving us with meters as our final unit for wavelength. And this is going to give us a value equal to 1.5 times negative fifth power meters. And we would say that based on our electromagnetic spectrum, which we look at in our textbooks or online, we see that this wavelength value corresponds to infrared light. And so our final answer here is going to be infrared light based on our wavelength in meters. So this is our final answer. If you have any questions leave