Why does the sky look blue?

Answer 1

Because it's prettyful.

Answer 2

An age old question. The sky is blue because the air molecules absorb most of the light from the sun that isn't blue and reflect the light that is blue. This is why the sky looks more blue on the horizon: the light has to pass more air particles and is more likely to be reflected back to you.

Answer 3

The sky is blue partly because air scatters short-wavelength light in preference to longer wavelengths. Combined, these effects scatter (bend away in all directions) some short, blue light waves while allowing almost all longer, red light waves to pass straight through. When we look toward a part of the sky not near the sun, the blue color we see is blue light waves scattered down toward us from the white sunlight passing through the air overhead. Near sunrise and sunset, most of the light we see comes in nearly tangent to the Earth's surface, so that the light's path through the atmosphere is so long that much of the blue and even yellow light is scattered out, leaving the sun rays and the clouds it illuminates red.

Scattering and absorption are major causes of the attenuation of radiation by the atmosphere. Scattering varies as a function of the ratio of the particle diameter to the wavelength of the radiation. When this ratio is less than about one-tenth, Rayleigh scattering occurs in which the scattering coefficient varies inversely as the fourth power of the wavelength. At larger values of the ratio of particle diameter to wavelength, the scattering varies in a complex fashion described, for spherical particles, by the Mie theory; at a ratio of the order of 10, the laws of geometric optics begin to apply.

Answer 4

WHY IS THE SKY BLUE?
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.

However, 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 5

To start of with we must understand what light is.

Light isnt just made up of 1 colour, it contains a number of different colours each of which has a different wavelength. Light is split up into the following colours with the first having the longest wavelenght and the last having the shortest.

Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Indico
Violet

An easy way to rememeber this is ROY G BIV (my year 12 geology teacher taught me that about 8 years ago)

As light moves through the atmosphere, most of the longer wavelengths are able to pass straight through. Little of the red, orange and yellow light is affected by the air. However, much of the shorter wavelength light is absorbed by the gas molecules in the atmosphere which is mainly nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%). The absorbed blue light is then scattered in all different directions. Since you see the blue light from everywhere overhead, the sky looks blue.

On Earth, the sun appears yellow. If you were out in space, or on the moon, the sun would look white. In space, there is no atmosphere to scatter the sun's light. On Earth, some of the shorter wavelength light (the blues and violets) are removed from the direct rays of the sun by scattering. The remaining colors together appear yellow.

You didnt ask about sunsets, but what the heck :)

What happens during sunsets is that as the sun begins to go down, the light must travel farther through the atmosphere before it gets to you. More of the light is reflected and scattered. As less light reaches you directly, the sun appears less bright. The color of the sun itself appears to change, first to orange and then to red. This is because even more of the short wavelength blues and greens are now scattered. Only the longer wavelengths are left in the direct beam that reaches your eyes.

Answer 6

When light encounters particles much smaller than the wavelength of light, the light scatters. A phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering. Atmospheric gas is an enormous resevoir of such particles. Short wavelengths scatter most effectively, and blue has a short wavelength, so the blue light scatters and appears to fill the sky. Though violet has a shorter wavelength than blue, human eye is not very good at seeing violet.

Answer 7

because of the light spectrum ROYGBIV. Blue is the color that is refracted through the atmosphere when the light from the sun comes in... during a sunset the sun is at a steeper angle which means light has to travel through more of the atmosphere to meet your eye and more color is broken out of the suns light causing the orange/ red in sunsets.

Answer 8

Refraction

Answer 9

becuase of all the matter and water on earth it reflects up into the sky... to keep it simpal.

Answer 10

It is the way the atmosphere refracts the light

Answer 11

Because of all the gases in the atmosphere.