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Asked by anon-217639 to Savannah, Philippe, Lucy, Joanna, Harrison, Edoardo on 12 Jun 2019.
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Savannah Clawson answered on 12 Jun 2019: last edited 12 Jun 2019 10:11 am
The light we see around us from the Sun is actually made up of all the colours of the rainbow. You can see this for yourself when we see rainbows in the sky – this is caused by rain drops splitting up all of the different colours (the rain acts like what we call a prism). We can think of light as being like a wave and different colours of light have different wavelengths – blue light waves are shorter than red light waves and all of the other colours are somewhere in between.
Light will always travel in straight lines unless something gets in its way. The molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere (in the sky) interact with the light and cause it to scatter in all directions. It just so happens that the molecules in the air are just the right size to scatter the blue part of the light coming from the Sun – so the blue light bounces around the most and gets bounced into our eyes. This is why we see the colour blue!
This also explains why we sometimes see the sky looking red when the sun is setting – the light from the sun has to pass through more of the Earth’s atmosphere before it reaches us due to the angle of the sun in the sky as it sets. This means that the blue light is scattered even more than before and we don’t really see much of it at all! Instead, we see the longer red waves that don’t get scattered much and travel straight towards us.
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Edoardo Vescovi answered on 12 Jun 2019: last edited 12 Jun 2019 7:20 pm
You can see that the atmosphere behaves like a prism that splits the sun’s white light into single colours. At sunrise or sunset, the change of the sun’s position is such that the green light hits your eyes for a split second. Look up “green flash” to know the best conditions to catch it.
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Philippe Gambron answered on 14 Jun 2019:
The light from the Sun is made of different colours which, when they are combined, look white. When they go though the atmosphere, that light makes the electrons of the atoms wobble and, as a consequence, it is scattered in all directions. It turns out that the blue light makes them wobble more because it has a higher frequency and electrons prefer to wobble faster. So blue is scattered more than red. So the sky is blue and the sun looks red but, in reality, it is slightly, green.
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Harrison Prosper answered on 15 Jun 2019: last edited 15 Jun 2019 12:44 pm
You’ve already had wonderful answers from the other scientists, so I do not have much to add except that without an atmosphere the sky would be pitch black even in broad daylight!
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