What is the difference between a continuous spectrum and an emission spectrum?
continuous spectrum: In physics, continuous spectrum refers to a range of values which may be graphed to fill a range with closely-spaced or overlapping intervals. The term is derived from the use of the word spectrum to describe the ‘ghost-like’ rainbow which appears when white light is shone through a clear scattering medium, such as water droplets or a prism. Colors are red,orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. They can show up together and overlapping, or individually. The idea of a continuous spectrum can be viewed as “a continuous set of eigenvalues” — an apparent contradiction in terms. Eigenvectors occur discretely. The mathematics of continuous spectra belongs to spectral theory, a branch of functional analysis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_spectrum emission spectrum: An element’s emission spectrum is the relative intensity of electromagnetic radiation of each frequency it emits when it is heated (or more generally when it is excited). When the electrons
