A young neighbor asked me why the sky is blue, and I told him that it was the best color to use(he is only 4 )

Question

But out of pure curiosity, why IS the sky blue?

Answer 1

Light coming from the sun is what's called "white light" White light contains all the colors of the rainbow. When it enters Earth's atmosphere this light is separated into its individual colors by chemical elements in the atmosphere and scattered across the sky. Nitrogen is the most abundant element in our atmosphere, and that element scatters the color blue across our sky more than the other colors. In space, there is no atmosphere to separate colors from the white light and space looks black.

Answer 2

Sun light is made up of different colors as you see in rainbows. Red light with it's longer wave length can penetrate the atmosphere more readily than blue light that has shorter wave length. As a result, the blue light gets scattered throughout the atmosphere and is what we usually see as we look in the sky away from the sun. The sun looks more red near sunrise and sunset when we look close or directly at it because we look through more atmosphere and more red reaches our eyes with it's long wave lengths.

Answer 3

It's like any other situation where you shine light through some transparent medium. Some wavelengths of light are more readily absorbed than others. When you look through tinted glass (say a green tint) light is being preferentially absorbed in all wavelengths except the green you see.

Air tends to absorb more of the spectrum outside the blue range. This is somewhat dependent on the angle that you view the sun through though. During sunrise or sunset, more of the red spectrum is bent toward locations on the earth that see the sun at these angles.

Answer 4

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 5

It is due to the dispersion of light. The light from the sun undergoes refraction whn it passes through our atmosphere. whn it gets refracted the blue light is dispersed more than others by air molecules. Therefore the sky appears blue :)