Why is the sky blue?

Answer 1

God is genius! (- -,)

Answer 2

After the question has been asked 15 million times, the vast majority of answers are still wrong. The sky is blue due to Rayleigh scattering as leviathan has explained - and has been explained every other time this question has been asked. It is not the reflection of the oceans.

What is the point of people answering questions correctly if so many clowns come in with wrong answers?

Answer 3

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 4

Because of the different layers of the sky. They become a darker shade of blue the further you go up, towards space.

Answer 5

The sky is black. The atmosphere is blue. The sky is the colour of whatever is reflecting from things such as the sun or the sea. Think of night time, it's black then.

Answer 6

The sky is blue because of the reflection of the oceans and sea's.

Answer 7

sky is blue because of way sun light reflects through our atmosphere...same reason why we sumtimes get a red sky at night or in the morning

Answer 8

The sky ISNT blue, the tinge of the atmosphere is blue,
thats what you see when you look up!

Answer 9

the sky is blue becasue if diffraction of light waves through particles in the air, it goes red during the sunrise and sunset becasue of the angle meaning it has to go through more particles

Answer 10

The Earth's atmosphere absorbs the longer wavelenths of visible sunlight and lets the shorter ones through. Those shorter wavelengths are picked up by receptors in the retina of your eye and coverted to electrochemical signals in your brain, which you percieve as the specific colour you are socially conditioned to call blue.

Answer 11

For the last phucking time the sky is BLACK