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Why is the sky blue?
Asked by anonymous -
Highest Rated Answer
The blue color of the sky is due to Rayleigh scattering. As light moves through the atmosphere, most of the longer wavelengths pass straight through. Little of the red, orange and yellow light is affected by the air.
However, much of the shorter wavelength light is absorbed by the gas molecules. The absorbed blue light is then radiated in different directions. It gets scattered all around the sky. Whichever direction you look, some of this scattered blue light reaches you. Since you see the blue light from everywhere overhead, the sky looks blue.
The sunlit sky appears blue because air scatters short-wavelength light more than longer wavelengths. Since blue light is at the short wavelength end of the visible spectrum, it is more strongly scattered in the atmosphere than long wavelength red light. The result is that the human eye perceives blue when looking toward parts of the sky other than the sun.[1] Near sunrise and sunset, most of the light we see comes in nearly tangent to the Earth's surface, so that the light's path through the atmosphere is so long that much of the blue and even green light is scattered out, leaving the sun rays and the clouds it illuminates red. Therefore, when looking at the sunset and sunrise, you will see the color red more than any of the other colors.
Scattering and absorption are major causes of the attenuation of radiation by the atmosphere. Scattering varies as a function of the ratio of the particle diameter to the wavelength of the radiation. When this ratio is less than about one-tenth, Rayleigh scattering occurs in which the scattering coefficient varies inversely as the fourth power of the wavelength. At larger values of the ratio of particle diameter to wavelength, the scattering varies in a complex fashion described, for spherical particles, by the Mie theory; at a ratio of the order of 10, the laws of geometric optics begin to apply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffuse_sky_radiation
Wow how many times do i have to tell people!
The sky is blue because If it was Green it would look like Cr@p! :D
Other Answers
The answer to the sky being blue is somewhat complex for us non-science people. I always hated this part in school. but the answer has to do with lightwaves. The light that comes from the sun actually is all the different colors of the rainbow like a prism so to speak. Colors have different wavelengths just like sound does. Red has the longest wavelength and violet and blue have the shortest wavelengths.
When the light from the sun enters our atmosphere it collides with oxygen and nitrogen atoms and the light with the shortest wavelengths are scattered. So the new question is, "why is the sky not violet or purple since it has the shortest wavelength?"
Well, our eyes are actually more sensitive to blue light than violet light. Therefore, we believe the sky to be blue.
Anonymous
The sky is blue because of the atmosphere. If there was no atmosphere, we would not be able to breathe.
because it just is blue


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