Why Is The Sky Blue?

INTRODUCTON

A bright blue sky is universally associated with a sunny, cloudless day. This brilliant colour is the result of the interesting way the sunlight interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere.

DIFFERENT COLOURS OF LIGHT

Most light sources, like the sun, give off ‘white light’. However, this light is in fact made up of a mix of all the colours of the rainbow. Each of these colours travels in ‘waves’. Red and yellow have longer, slower waves, whereas blue and violet have shorter, faster waves.

When light travels in a straight line, the waves mix and we see these colours all together as white light.

RAINBOWS

Sometimes when it rains, we will see a rainbow. This happens because the sunlight is split up when it shines through raindrops. The water in the drops is denser than the air, so they ‘slow down’ the light as it passes through. Depending on the length of the waves of light, the water will slow the light down more or less. This means the different colours get split up; as a result, we see them all spread out in a rainbow.

THE SKY

There are other ways that light can be split up. When sunlight enters the atmosphere, it is ‘scattered’ by the gases and particles in the air. As blue light has short waves, it is scattered more than the other colours of light. This is because air particles are too small to disturb the larger waves. We can visualise this by thinking about the sea: if we throw a stone into a large wave, it won’t have much effect. On the other hand, if there are small ripples, the stone will disrupt them much more.

This scattering effect is why we see a blue sky most of the time.

At sunset, we often see the sky as red or orange. This is because, as the sun gets lower in the sky, the light has to pass through more particles to reach our eyes. This means the blue light is scattered too much, so more red and orange light will reach us than blue.

CONCLUSION

All the colours we see every day are the result of how light interacts with our surroundings. The brilliant blue of the sky is just one example of how those interactions can influence what we see.

RACHEL DAUNCEY

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