Mirage!
Have you ever noticed something that looks like pool of blue water when driving on the highway on a sunny afternoon? Yeah! It looks like you saw pool of water ahead but you never got to the place where the water was actually. This is called Mirage.
The phenomenon occurs when light (sunlight) passes through air of different temperatures in the atmosphere (the air at one level is a lot hotter than the air at an adjoining level).
If you are on a highway and you are looking straight ahead, here is how a mirage is formed. The air is denser with a cold temperature, and then slightly below your line of sight, the air is less dense with a warm temperature. This happens frequently on hot summer days when the sun shines on a black asphalt highway which makes the air closer to the ground hot while the air slightly above is warm. Therefore when rays of light coming down from the sky get close to the hot air near the ground, the light rays are bent (refracted) back up toward your eyes, so what you see is actually the reflection of the sky emitted from the hot black asphalt ahead. You can also experience this phenomenon in the deserts as well. They are optical illusion that occurs as a result of optics in physics.
The next time you are traveling down the high away and you sight a pool of water ahead, you can be rest assured that it is a mirage and it’s not real.
We hope this article educates you well enough, visit www.sveyecliic.com/blog for more educative contents.
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