Sunlight may appear colorless, but its makeup consists of different wavelengths which combine to form what we perceive as white light. White light contains all of the colors from the rainbow including red, orange, yellow, green blue indigo and violet hues.
As sunlight passes through Earth’s atmosphere, it encounters gas molecules and is scattered all around. Blue wavelengths tend to become scattered more than their longer red ones.
Light
As sunlight passes through the atmosphere, it interacts with tiny gas particles and scatters into various wavelengths – with blue light dispersion being greater than other hues, giving rise to its characteristic hue in the sky. This phenomenon gives sky its characteristic hue.
When shining a torch into a glass containing milk and water, its beam will appear blue due to Rayleigh Scattering: the effect caused by molecules dispersing light emitted by the torch in all directions, but especially at shorter wavelengths such as blue and violet light rays from its source.
Sunlight provides us with all the colors of the rainbow, yet our eyes perceive only red-orange and blue light from it. That is due to three types of cones which detect various wavelengths of light; blue and green cones predominate while a few monochromatic rods that respond only to red light can also be detected by our eyes and combined by our brains as white light.
Have you noticed how the sky changes as the sun sets or rises? This is due to sunlight traveling further through the atmosphere nearer the horizon than overhead, and passing through more gases at lower altitudes that scatter short wavelengths of blue light more than longer wavelengths such as red and orange – leading to less blue reaching your eyes as a result.
As you ascend into the atmosphere, the sky would eventually start to turn black due to less molecules being available to scatter light. A clear day’s sky looks blue while clouds block out this natural illumination from above making it look grayish instead.
People have long speculated that the blue hue of the sky can be explained by small particles of dust or drops of water vapour floating in the atmosphere; you may still hear people suggesting this explanation today. But scientists soon proved this theory wrong when they discovered that variations in sky color due to humidity or haze conditions far exceeded any explanation provided by such mechanisms.
Atmosphere
Physics-wise, the colors we see in the sky don’t come directly from sunlight or even air itself; rather, their origin lies within an interaction between Sun wavelengths reaching Earth’s atmosphere and different gases and particles–with blue light being more easily scattered than other hues.
As such, most direct sunlight emitted into our eyes will have blue wavelengths; that is why most of the sky appears blue to us. But some other colors (particularly reds and yellows ) don’t scatter as easily and this causes most of it to appear as white in hue.
From high altitudes, the sky appears hazy or cloudy due to gases and particles–mainly nitrogen and oxygen–that have larger wavelengths than visible light wavelengths, meaning they absorb and scatter light differently than blue light wavelengths.
As the Sun declines lower in the sky, its effect becomes increasingly prominent, which is why sunsets and sunrises appear reddish in tone. That is due to sunlight entering deeper into the atmosphere being stripped of shorter wavelengths due to Rayleigh Scattering; only then does its light reach your eyes without competing against reds and yellows for attention.
Sky appears blue when there’s moisture in the air, such as during a rain or snowfall. Water droplets tend to be larger than wavelengths of light and can scatter and absorb all visible wavelengths evenly rather than simply blue light.
Rayleigh Scattering
An incidental light beam traversing through the atmosphere will encounter many different things – air molecules, dust particles, water droplets and other particles all scatter light rays in all directions – particularly those with shorter wavelengths like blue and violet that tend to be dispersed more strongly than longer ones like red – this process gives the sky its characteristic hue of blue.
An airplane pilot can observe this effect with ease: when their plane reaches an altitude where the air is clear, the sky appears blue; but as their plane climbs higher into denser air layers, the color begins to fade as air molecules block sunlight’s ability to pass through and hit their eyes directly.
John Tyndall took an important first step toward understanding why the sky is blue by discovering, in 1859, that when light passes through fluid with suspended particles it turns blue; his experiment demonstrated what is now called Rayleigh Scattering.
Rayleigh scattering occurs due to air molecules colliding and clumping together, causing light rays that strike one of these clumps to be deflected in all directions around it. Shorter wavelengths (blue and violet) tend to be deflected more strongly than longer ones (red and yellow); giving sky its blue hue.
Sunlight reaching Earth’s atmosphere also interacts with gases and particles present, contributing to its hue. But Mars has such a thin atmosphere that light does not have this same impact; solar illumination reaching Mars’s surface must travel further before arriving on our planet, diminishing its intensity as a source of blue hue.
Another approach to explain why the sky is blue is by comparing it with a mirror. A mirror reflects all wavelengths of visible light equally, yet appears colored due to their scattered light being scattered differently across it. If made of material which reacted differently with certain wavelengths of light it would look black instead.
Oxygen
Imagine a girl approaching a boy and asking, “Do you know why the sky is blue?” His reaction would probably be similar to yours when someone asks him this question about an object in space that doesn’t belong there! Suddenly this strange woman knows why and walks off quickly after saying she knows herself before smiling as she responded that yes indeed she did, leaving him curious as he wonders who this strange individual might be that knows such useless facts.
Sunlight consists of a rainbow’s worth of colors, each one distinguished by its own specific wavelength. By passing white light through a prism and splitting it apart into its component parts – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet bands of light–you can separate out their individual frequencies–red having the longest wavelength and violet having one of the shortest.
As soon as sunlight enters our atmosphere, it is quickly dispersed across its entirety by air molecules – tiny particles much smaller than visible light wavelengths- which scatter it into all directions at different speeds. Such Rayleigh scattering explains why our skies appear blue!
Short wavelengths of blue light can more readily polarized; that is, their electric fields align perpendicularly, making it more likely to pass straight through the atmosphere and reach your eyes. By contrast, long wavelengths of red and other colors scatter more easily, which accounts for why sunset or sunrise appears redder in hue.
The color of the sky may also be altered by other particles in the atmosphere, such as smoke or volcanic ash, and as such may sometimes appear hazy or gray; however, most often its stunning shade of blue can be found.