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🌈 SCIENCE · Science explained · 2026-08-24

Why a rainbow has seven colours — and why no two people ever see the same one

Same news, rewritten for 6 Japanese school grades — pick your level below. Furigana + translation included.
170 chars · ~3 min · 24 kanji
🌈 SCIENCE 太陽 たいよう
Same sentence · 6 levels

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雨上あめあがりの 空そらに 七ななつの 色いろの にじが 出でます。

にじを 作つくるのは 空そらに うかぶ 水みずの つぶです。

太陽たいようの 光ひかりが つぶに 入はいる とき、光ひかりは 曲まがります。

つぶの 中なかで はね返かえり、出でる ときに もう 一度いちど 曲まがります。

色いろに よって 曲まがり方かたが ちがい、白しろい 光ひかりが 赤あか・黄き・緑みどり・青あおに 分わかれます。

にじを 見みる とき、太陽たいようは 自分じぶんの 後うしろに あります。

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Translation

In the sky after the rain, a seven-coloured rainbow appears.

What makes a rainbow is the water droplets floating in the air.

When sunlight enters a droplet, the light bends.

It bounces off the back inside the droplet, then bends once more on the way out.

Each colour bends differently, so white light splits into red, yellow, green and blue.

When you look at a rainbow, the sun is behind you.

Why does a rainbow have seven colours?

A rainbow is not an object hanging in the sky. It is an angle.

Every rainbow is built out of ordinary raindrops. Sunlight enters a drop and bends, bounces off the far inner wall, then bends again on the way out. Each colour bends by a slightly different amount, so the white light that went in comes back out spread into a band running from red to violet.

Those bending angles are fixed. Red light leaves a drop at roughly 42 degrees from the line running straight back to the sun, violet at roughly 40. That is why every rainbow is the same size, why the colours always sit in the same order, and why the sun is always behind you when you see one.

It also means a rainbow has no fixed location. The drops sending red light to your eye are not the drops sending red light to the person standing next to you. Two people side by side are looking at two different rainbows made of two different sets of raindrops — and if you walk, your rainbow walks with you.

A rainbow is really a full circle, too. The ground simply cuts off the bottom half. From high enough up — from an aeroplane window — you can see the whole ring. And the faint second bow that sometimes hangs outside the bright one, with its colours reversed, is light that bounced twice inside the drops instead of once.

Isaac Newton settled the explanation about three hundred years ago by splitting sunlight with a prism. Before that, a rainbow was mostly read as a sign.

This article comes in six versions, one for each school grade from 1 to 6, with furigana and full Vietnamese and English translations, so you can read the same story at your own kanji level.

Why can two people never see the same rainbow?

A rainbow is defined by an angle between the sun, the raindrops and your eye — red at about 42 degrees, violet at about 40. Only drops sitting at exactly that angle from your own line of sight send their light to you. Someone standing a metre away has a different line of sight, so a different set of drops does the work. Their rainbow is a real rainbow, but it is made of different water than yours.

Is a rainbow really a circle?

Yes. The 42-degree rule sweeps out a full cone around the point directly opposite the sun, so the shape is a complete ring. On the ground the horizon hides the lower half and you only ever see an arc. From an aeroplane, or above a waterfall in the right light, the whole circle can be visible.

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Why six school grades, and not N5–N1?

Because that is how Japanese children learn to read. Japan's Ministry of Education fixes exactly which character belongs to which grade — so "grade 3" is a boundary you can verify, not a feeling. Every article here is machine-checked: if a single character sits above its grade, it is not published.

The result: you never hit a character you have not learned. That is the whole reason this product exists.

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