Sodium-vapor lamps are a common source of lighting. The emission spectrum from this type of lamp is shown. Is this a continuous or line emission spectrum?

Video transcript

Welcome back everyone. We're told that mercury vapor lamps were developed in 18 35 as a source of light and was discontinued in favor of metal Halide lamps shown below is the emission spectrum of a mercury vapor lamp, identify if this is a continuous or line emission spectrum. So we're going to begin by defining each of these types of spectrums beginning with a continuous spectrum. We want to recall that a continuous emission spectrum is going to be a spectrum which has all given wavelengths, sorry, all given wavelengths in a certain limit. And so we would see all colors of the rainbow with lines at every value of wavelength. And now referring to what a line line emission spectrum is, we're going to recognize that it's going to have or it will say it's a spectrum which has only some lines of wavelength in a given limit. And so looking at our diagram from the prompt, we can see that we just see the color blue And our blue lines only occur at wavelengths ranging from about 410 nm to about nm. And so we don't see any Emission lines beyond 610 nm. So we'll write that out. No emission lines seen After 610 nm. and 10 nanometers. And so we would confirm that therefore our emission spectrum depicted by our mercury vapor lamp is going to be Choice B, which is going to be a line spectrum. So be it would be our final answer to complete this example Because it only shows some lines of wavelength ranging from 410 nm to 610 nm. If you have any questions, please leave them down below and I'll see everyone in the next practice video.