Why is the sky "Blue"?

Answer 1

The refraction (scattering) of light waves from the sun by our atmosphere causes the sky to appear blue.

Answer 2

The blue color of the sky is due to Rayleigh scattering. As light moves through the atmosphere, most of the longer wavelengths pass straight through. Little of the red, orange and yellow light is affected by the air.

Much of the shorter wavelength light is absorbed by the gas molecules. The absorbed blue light is then radiated in different directions. It gets scattered all around the sky. Whichever direction you look, some of this scattered blue light reaches you. Since you see the blue light from everywhere overhead, the sky looks blue.

Answer 3

the sky is blue due to the molecular composition of the earths atmosphere! The air simply defracts more blue light from incoming sources than it does other types. As for sunsets and sun rises... the light has to pass through much more atmosphere (and other particles... dust, pollutants), and thus by the time it reaches our eyes mos to fhte blue and green light has been defracted already and we are left with reds yellows and greens

Answer 4

The light that come from sun is white light, that means there is a mixture of radiation across the visible spectra. The atmosphere acts like a filter and absorbs some colors more than others. The result is color blue. If there were more CO2 in the atmosphere, it would be green. When there is smog it is brown.

Answer 5

A clear cloudless day-time sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light. When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight.

The white light from the sun is a mixture of all colours of the rainbow. This was demonstrated by Isaac Newton, who used a prism to separate the different colours and so form a spectrum. The colours of light are distinguished by their different wavelengths. The visible part of the spectrum ranges from red light with a wavelength of about 720 nm, to violet with a wavelength of about 380 nm, with orange, yellow, green, blue and indigo between. The three different types of colour receptors in the retina of the human eye respond most strongly to red, green and blue wavelengths, giving us our colour vision.

Tyndall Effect
The first steps towards correctly explaining the colour of the sky were taken by John Tyndall in 1859. He discovered that when light passes through a clear fluid holding small particles in suspension, the shorter blue wavelengths are scattered more strongly than the red. This can be demonstrated by shining a beam of white light through a tank of water with a little milk or soap mixed in. From the side, the beam can be seen by the blue light it scatters; but the light seen directly from the end is reddened after it has passed through the tank. The scattered light can also be shown to be polarised using a filter of polarised light, just as the sky appears a deeper blue through polaroid sun glasses.

This is most correctly called the Tyndall effect, but it is more commonly known to physicists as Rayleigh scattering--after Lord Rayleigh, who studied it in more detail a few years later. He showed that the amount of light scattered is inversely proportional to the fourth power of wavelength for sufficiently small particles. It follows that blue light is scattered more than red light by a factor of (700/400)4 ~= 10.

Answer 6

The color is due to the different gases that compose the different layers of the atmosphere. Different particles reflect light differently. We see the sky as blue due to the way light from the sun bounces off these gas particles.

Answer 7

the sky isn't blue, it's colorless - it only looks blue because the air molcules between us and the "sky" (outer space) tend not to absorb the blue lightwaves.


For exactly the same reason, mountains seen from far away have a bluish tinge as well.

Answer 8

Water Vapor refracting the suns light to the spectrum of blue....what we see....

Answer 9

difraction of the light in the sky lol

Answer 10

It's a reflection from the ocean.