Sunlight from Earth passes through Earth’s atmosphere and is scattered by gas molecules, producing many different patterns of illumination. Red, orange and yellow wavelengths pass directly through the atmosphere while blue-tinged wavelengths such as violet get strongly dispersed into other directions.
Your eyes see the sky as blue due to certain physical processes; let’s discuss these theories of action and reaction.
The Sun’s Light
As sunlight travels through Earth’s atmosphere, its light is scattered by air molecules. Shorter wavelengths (such as blue) tend to be scattered more easily than longer ones like red; hence why most of the light reaching our eyes has already been scattered! Hence why the sky appears blue.
Rayleigh scattering is a special property of certain gases such as oxygen and nitrogen. This process works because their very small particles, much smaller than light wavelengths, scatter light of only one color when exposed to light from above. So if the air contains molecules of oxygen and nitrogen combined together and the sun illuminates them from below, then blue hues are produced in its wake.
As this phenomenon holds true for other stars as well, this explains why our galaxy appears bluer. The color of any given star depends upon its distance from Earth as well as its surface composition and atmosphere.
Scientists have long studied why the sky is blue. John Tyndall demonstrated in the 1800s that when passing white light through clear liquid containing small particles like milk or soap, short blue wavelengths are scattered more than red ones due to particle sizes being smaller than wavelengths and therefore can only scatter either color at once.
But the primary cause for our sky’s color can be found in its chemical makeup: oxygen is produced by photosynthetic bacteria which also contribute to producing nitrogen which forms most of our atmosphere.
Not only can bacteria produce oxygen, but they are also capable of turning carbon dioxide into sugar through photosynthesis – this process allows plants to make food with energy from sunlight. Thus our atmosphere has an abundant supply of oxygen while having relatively little carbon dioxide; as a result most visible light reaches our eyes in blue or cyan hues.
The Atmosphere
The Earth’s atmosphere is an expansive cloud of gases encasing its planet. This atmosphere bends and scatters light, giving rise to blue hues in the sky. Composed primarily of nitrogen oxides, oxygen gasses, and water vapor, its gases also absorb various colors of light that pass through it.
As the sun passes through our atmosphere on its journey from sunrise to sunset, air molecules scatter blue and violet light that is closer in frequency to natural resonant frequencies of molecules found within it – this phenomenon known as Rayleigh Scattering gives our skies their color while red light that doesn’t get scattered continues its journey along its original route.
Why doesn’t the entire sky look blue? Without scattering, sunlight would pass straight through our atmosphere and look yellow; but that has nothing to do with its structure; instead it has everything to do with layers in our atmosphere, each with different temperature, pressure, and phenomena – the closest layer is called the troposphere and contains most clouds while weather takes place here; above it lies stratosphere with jet streams and an ozone layer; at higher altitudes up above this is thermosphere which reaches temperatures up to 2,000C (3600F); eventually merging with outer space itself!
The mesosphere lies directly above the stratosphere. Here, most of the water vapor and volcanic eruptions and forest fires occur. Additionally, its density is much less than that of its counterpart; with almost no air molecules present to refract or scatter light.
Tyndall and Rayleigh speculated in the past that small particles of dust or droplets of water vapor were the source of sky’s blue hue, but modern scientists know better: light scattered by nitrogen and oxygen molecules is to blame, which tends to favour scattering blue wavelengths while also scattering other colors of light.
Oxygen
Oxygen makes up around 21% of our air, keeping life alive on Earth and found in all living organisms. Although normally inert at normal temperatures and pressures, oxygen has the unique property of reacting with other elements to form H2O and CO2.
As sunlight passes through the atmosphere, molecules scatter light in all directions. Blue wavelengths are scattered more strongly than red or yellow ones; thus producing what seems to be a predominantly blue sky. In reality, however, its color depends more on its wavelength than concentration of molecules in the atmosphere.
Air is composed of many gases other than just oxygen; some examples include nitrogen and argon. When light strikes these smaller molecules, light gets scattered in much the same way it would with oxygen molecules – this phenomenon is known as Rayleigh Scattering and accounts for why our skies appear blue rather than violet.
As the Sun gets lower in the sky at sunset and sunrise, more of its light must pass through our atmosphere before reaching our eyes. Longer red and yellow wavelengths tend to reflect off atmospheric molecules more readily and appear redder as they enter our vision.
When the sky is clear, its color is usually an intensely deep blue. But this can change at other times depending on factors like dust, pollution and water vapor in the air – for instance when there is a forest fire or volcanic eruption where fine particles larger than wavelengths of sunlight scatter reddish light; giving rise to butterscotch hues across Western skies that even change their appearance completely! Meanwhile, other planets also vary greatly in their atmospheres which has its own set of rules regarding what colors exist above our heads.
Rayleigh Scattering
An expansive blue sky is the result of the Sun’s light interplaying with Earth’s atmosphere in complex ways. Light passes through and gets scattered by gases and particles present, such as nitrogen oxides, oxygen molecules, water vapor particles and pollutants such as dust. Scattering tends to occur more strongly at shorter wavelengths such as those nearer the blue end of the spectrum; reds and yellows of sunset don’t get scattered as easily.
Light can reflect off of air molecules using Rayleigh scattering, named for Lord Rayleigh who first discovered it in the 1800s. This effect happens without loss of energy or changes to wavelength, with wavelengths shorter than that of air molecules causing greater scattering than others, giving the sky its signature hue.
Sunlight may appear colorless, but it actually contains all the colors of the rainbow – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. When we shine white light through a prism it dissects into its individual hues due to atmospheric phenomena called refraction – light bends when traveling from air into water or vice versa which causes its light rays to bend differently, producing different colored refraction patterns and giving rise to blue skies in turn.
Have you ever noticed how the sky changes color as it approaches the horizon? This is due to sunlight travelling farther through the atmosphere and having more wavelengths scattered – particularly those belonging to blue wavelengths which then result in visible light having an overall pale blue hue.
At dusk and dawn, the same mechanism that causes the sky to be blue also accounts for why it turns red and orange – due to the Sun being closer to its horizon at those times, more of our atmosphere must pass between it and us before reaching us; more blue-violet light is scattered away by this extra atmosphere, leaving only longer wavelengths (reds and yellows) able to reach our eyes unobstructed.