why is the sky blue??????????

Answer 1

There have been some REALLY CLOSE answers on here and some completely asinine answers (reflection from the ocean?!?! WTF?) The sun's rays are composed of white light. White light is a composition of all colours. The molecules, ions and particulate matter (CCN's) in the atmosphere reflect all other colours EXCEPT the blue colour (the "blue" wavelength) . the Blue colour (wavelength) is therefore, the only colour that reaches your cornea and iris and that is why your brain registers the sky as blue.

Answer 2

The sky is blue due to an atmosphetic effect called Rayleigh scattering - certainly not because its reflecting the ocean which people sometimes say! Rayleigh scattering involves the scattering of light by molecules smaller than the wavelength of light. It has a smaller effect on colours with longer wavelengths and that is why the sky is blue - and also in fact why the sun is yellow - if you added up all the blue tint in the sky and focused it in the area of sun you would get its actual colour of bright white, which is what you’d see in space.

Physicists used to say that Rayleigh diffraction was responsible for the reddish tint in sunrise and sunset because the light had to travel through more atmosphere to reach us however this is currently disputed and there is another optical theorem at work called 'Lorenz-Mie theory'.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/question39.htm
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/BlueSky/blue_sky.html
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmos/blusky.html
http://www.exo.net/~pauld/physics/why_is_sky_blue.html

Kind regards.

Answer 3

Did you not notice that when you were typing this question that it was giving you similar questions that have been asked in the past? The count for this one is probably well over 5000 by now...

The sky looks blue because of light "scatter"...

Because each color of light has a different wavelength.. using ROYGBIV .. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet as the colors of the rainbow... Red has the longest wavelength and Violet has the shortest... it just happens that Blue has the correct wavelength to get scattered by the molecules of water, dirt, etc in our atmosphere to be directed down into our vision while the other colors either pass through the atmosphere further (like the Red we see in the evening) or don't reach us on the surface because they are absorbed in the air.

Answer 4

White light from the sun is a mixture of all the colours of the rainbow, each colour is differentiated by its wavelength. When white light passes through the atmosphere the shorter blue wavelenghths are scattered more than the other colours.

On a clear day the sky looks blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun

Answer 5

The color of the sky is a result of diffuse sky radiation which turns it a light violet color. It appears blue because human eyes cannot see deeply into the violet range and sees colors closer to green the best. On a sunny day the earth sky usually looks as a blue gradient — dark in the zenith, light near the horizon (due to Rayleigh scattering). It can turn a multitude of colors at sunset/sunrise and turns black at night.

Answer 6

21 people have tried but no real good answer to this very good question so here is the real scoop. First of all visible radiation arriving from the sun is scattered by air molecules, blue through red. Here is the difference. Rayleigh scattering says that scattering is inversely proportion to the fourth power of the wavelength. This means of course that the shorter the wavelength (blue in the case of visible radiation), the greater will be the scattering, if and only if there is no scattering from suspended dust in the atmosphere. This latter type of scattering is referred to as Mie (pronounced me) scattering. Clear skies favor Rayleigh scattering (mostly blue light) while dirty skies favor Mie scattering (accounts though for beautiful sunsets) I hope this helps you

Answer 7

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.

Answer 8

the sky isnt blue, but sunlight filtered through our ozone causes it to look this way, depending on the angle of the sun in relation to the earth, at some points the sky will look red, orange and purple

Answer 9

someone who wrote you said''reflection of the ocean ''I thought the ocean is blue because it is a reflection of the sky..Anyway the sky is blue because the sky is also blue in Heaven ....I guess.

Answer 10

The sun's light gets refracted in our atmosphere and we are only able to perceive the blue part of the spectrum.