Why is the sky blue? – Mariana AE., age 11, Tucson, Arizona
You might think that it will be easy to elucidate why the sky is blue. But even a temporary explanation requires quite a lot of science. The colours of every thing you see are created in alternative ways. Some of those colours are explained by physics, others by my very own field of chemistry.
The nitrogen and oxygen you’re respiratory in are made up of very small particles called molecules. A nitrogen or oxygen molecule is actually, really small. Each molecule is just about 0.4 nanometers, or 16 billionths of an inch, in size. To reach the width of a strand of hair, 250,000 nitrogen molecules could be required. You can imagine the molecules behaving like very small balls which can be continuously bouncing around.
As sunlight travels through the atmosphere, it passes between lots of these tiny nitrogen and oxygen molecules. Sometimes the sunshine hits considered one of them directly.
In short, the sky looks blue due to… blue portion of sunlight It is rather more prone to be reflected by the molecules within the atmosphere than the opposite colours of sunshine.
Tennis balls and marbles
Now imagine the nitrogen and oxygen molecules as tennis balls and the sunshine as a pile of marbles.
When considered one of these light balls hits a nitrogen or oxygen tennis ball, the tennis ball “eats” the ball after which spits it out in a short time, but in a random direction. This process is something Physicists call scattering.
It was around 1870 when the British physicist John William Strutthigher generally known as Lord Rayleigh, was the primary to search out a proof for why the sky is blue: blue light from the sun is scattered most strongly when it passes through the atmosphere. His discovery is the explanation for the scientific name for this effect Rayleigh scattering.
The other gases within the atmosphere will also be of great importance, akin to the results of carbon dioxide or methane on the worldwide climate. However, they’ve little or no influence on the colour of the sky.
If there have been no scattering, the sky could be dark just like the moon, which has no atmosphere.
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A rainbow represents all of the several components that make up sunlight. When this light goes through the sunshine water droplets floating within the airit’s broken down into the component colours called the visible spectrum – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, easier to recollect than ROY G. BIV.
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Light on the blue end of the rainbow is scattered more efficiently than the opposite colours. It's as if the tennis balls are very picky in regards to the marbles they eat, preferring the blue ones over the opposite colours.
The result’s that the blue light is scattered across the sky, so on sunny days you see blue in all places. The remainder of the colours mainly travel directly through the atmosphere.
Redder because the sun sets and rises
Of course the sky shouldn’t be at all times blue.
And Rayleigh scattering also explains why the sky tends to be reddish when the sun is near the horizon – at sunrise and sunset.
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When the Sun is near the horizon, its light passes through many more parts of the atmosphere to achieve the Earth's surface than when it’s directly overhead. The blue and green light is scattered so well you can hardly see it. The sky is as a substitute coloured with red and orange light.
Colors mean loads to us in many various ways. Understanding the science behind color and expressing ourselves with color through art has been vital to humans throughout our recorded history. This is something to be mindful when deciding what color shirt to wear tomorrow morning.
image credit : theconversation.com