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THE JAINA PHILOSOPHY
and pry into the macrocosmos and see millions of distant stars and galaxies which are thousands of millions light years away With the growth of knowledge from their insights astronomy developed a whole new kind of study called astrophysics The science of spectroscopy became an indispensable branch of astronomy On its findings are based all the modern theories about the universe
The secrets of the universe are written largely in light and can be known by deciphering light itself Everybody knows that white sunlight bent apart by a prism becomes a rainbow of all the colours This is called a spectrum It was found many years ago that the sun's spectrum was not a perfect rainbow but slashed by many dark lines but nobody knew what they meant at that time Later studies showed that light emitted by elements at very high temperatures showed bright slashes in their spectrum Today the knowledge of atomic theory and the true nature of light has established that each element or kind of atom can emit and absorb energy only at the specific wave-length determined by its atomic structure Its pattern may have many lines or a few but its position on the spectrum is always the same and unlike that of any other Thus every element can reveal its identity by its spectral line signature written by the ink of its own unique colour or the fingerprint of its individual personality
The discovery of Helium, christened as the sun element, by its discoverer Sir Joseph Normal Lockyer, about a hundred years ago, was the result of the accurate interpretation of the sun's spectral lines with elements in its atmosphere Indeed, the white
16 The prism is now replaced by a more efficient light-splitting instrument viz., diffraction gratings of lines closely ruled on glass
