my five year old son would like to know ,why is the sky blue?

Answer 1

OK. First you need to know the answer yourself...

Might be a surprise, but Einstein was the person who "explained this." It has to do with the way sunlight is scattered by the molecules in the atmosphere. Blue light scatters more than red (Tyndall effect also known as Rayleigh scattering), so more blue light reaches our eye.

There is an excellent description at the website listed below (look at the cartoon and it will be pretty clear).

It is not a reflection from the ocean. And it isn't just water molecules that cause the effect.

I'd suggest that you find a prism and show your son how white light turns into a rainbow. Even if this doesn't answer the blue sky question, it will point your child toward a fascinating part of the physcial world and keep that questioning interest alive.

Aloha

Answer 2

The sky isn't blue. It just appears blue because of the visible light spectrum. The sunlight bends and the wave length is 480 nm. Very hard to explain to a 5 year old. But, you can take white light (which actually is all colors of the rainbow, Red Orange Yellow Blue Green Indigo and Violet) and get a prism and he will see a reflection of a rainbow when the light bends going through the glass.

Answer 3

The answer is simple and can be explained with the help of Raman Effect. However, the challenge is to explain it to a 5-year-old child.

I think instead of explaining through words, you should do a small experiment for him. Buy a prism and show him how it can break white sunlight into different colours on a sheet of white paper.

Then tell him that the sky is full of dust and particles that also make sunlight split in the same way and that most other colours of light are lost and only the "bluish" colours that are at the one extreme end of the spectrum manage to reach us.

Answer 4

All those people who have said its the reflection from the water, get a grip. The sky isnt yellow over the sahara!!!!!!

The water is blue due to the reflection of the blue sky. For the same reason as when it is cloudy and grey, the water turns the same colour.

Answer 5

First of all I'd just like to correct some of my fellow child-psychotherapy-PhDs up there: kids have an amazing ability to learn and can understand more stuff than you can imagine. They are only limited in the amount of background information they know, and not knowing doesn't have anything to do with comprehending complexity. In fact, if your 5-year-old knew just as much science as you did, s/he would probably understand complex scientific reasoning much faster than you would.

Now back to your kid's question:
The sun sends us white light as you surely know, which is composed of the seven colors of the spectrum. When this light enters our atmosphere, each color gets scattered by a certain amount (and is hence more visible). Violet and blue are the two colors that are scattered the most (this is entirely due to our atmosphere's composition). The sky looks blue and not violet because of a problem with our eyes (who guessed that would turn out to be the answer) which "see" more blue than violet. But anyway that's just a little scienfitic tidbit not very commonly known among non-scientific-folks (i.e. not geeks).

Try to simplify this as much as you can and tell it to your child. Remember that using metaphors is the best thing you can do to help him/her understand. Oh, and you might wanna lose the eye problem thing.

Answer 6

This question has beenasked many a time, the short is that really the sky coulours are mainly red, but we only see the blue part. There is a whole page or two relating to this, folow the link, al the best

Answer 7

Two ways to answer that question.
1. Different wavelenghts of light reflect differently from the sun depending on the angle the light is coming at earth. We get blue during the day and red/orange during dusk and dawn.

2. If I told you the sky was green and the grass was blue, you won't know any better. So just take it as fact.

Answer 8

To be perfectly clear: It is NOT the reflection of the oceans on our atmosphere.

It's because different colors of light are different wave lengths, and blue is the length that bounces back in such a way that it is the only one visible. This changes when the sun sets, in that the angle of the sun makes the different colored light waves bounce back in such a way that we can then see the colors of the sunset.

Answer 9

Rayleigh scattering (named after Lord Rayleigh) is the scattering of light, or other electromagnetic radiation, by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the light. It occurs when light travels in transparent solids and liquids, but is most prominently seen in gases. Rayleigh scattering of sunlight by the atmosphere is the main reason light from the sky is blue.

Answer 10

The refraction of the water droplets in the sky. To make it simple, the sun reflects off of the water drops in the air and goes back into the sky.

The sky is really black, like when you see it at night. It's because the sun isn't there to provide light to reflect the water.