Why Is The Sky Blue?
Classical Mechanics
Level
1
What causes the sky to have a beautiful light blue color?
Blue light from the Sun is strongly scattered
The sky is a source of blue colored light
The sky reflects the blue color of the ocean
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1 solution
The light from the sun looks white. But it is really made up of all the colors of the rainbow. When white light shines through a prism, the light is separated into all its colors. A prism is a specially shaped crystal.
All light travels in a straight line unless something gets in the way and does one of these things:—
Sunlight reaches Earth's atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all the gases and particles in the air. Scattering of light depends upon the wavelength. Smaller wavelength scatters more. According to the Rayleigh scattering , the intensity of scattering is inversely proportional to the fourth power of wavelength. Therefore, blue is scattered more than other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.