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Asked by eleanorbeedles to Sarah, Paul, Mark, Lily, Laura on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: General. This question was also asked by evierose, carletto, courtneyj, xbeckyx.
Question: Why is the sky blue?
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Lily Asquith answered on 21 Jun 2010:
Some of the light from the sun is red, some is green and some is blue. When you mix these three colours of light together, you get white light (you can test this using a prism to break sunlight up into its different colours).
You can only see an object if light is reflected (or `scattered’) off it. An object appears to be blue in daylight if it is made of a material that reflects the blue part of light and absorbs the others.
The material the sky is made of is mostly nitrogen and oxygen. This reflects blue light. So the sky looks blue.
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Mark Roberts answered on 21 Jun 2010:
It’s blue because of the way the light from the sun interacts with the atmosphere.
If you want to find out more have a look at:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/sky.htm -
Laura Maliszewski answered on 22 Jun 2010:
The sky isn’t actually any color, if you only look at a little bit of it it’s you can’t see the blue. The blue you see is caused by refraction of the sun through the atmosphere.
Check it out: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-is-the-sky-blue
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Paul Roche answered on 23 Jun 2010:
The sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the Sun more than they scatter red light – the Sun emits “white light”, which is a mixture of the colours of the rainbow, but as the atmosphere splits it up and separates it, the blue light is scattered across the whole sky. You’ll see red light more at sunset and sunrise, where all the blue light has been scattered away.
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Sarah Bardsley answered on 24 Jun 2010:
Blue light has a short wavelength and as it travels through the atmosphere it is absorbed and scattered. The other colours have longer wavelengths which pass through the atmosphere unaffected. This is why the colour we see is blue.
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