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Asked by cherry1 to Amar, Ana, Andrea, Leah, Matt on 17 Mar 2014.
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Anastasia Wass answered on 17 Mar 2014:
I’m not a physicist but I was told once it was to do with the way light reflected off particles in the atmosphere. I was also told this is why we can get a red sky in the morning or evening as the light reflects differently off dust particles.
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Amar Joshi answered on 17 Mar 2014:
Ana’s is right, the sky is blue because of the way light is scattered. The reason why the sky is red/orange at dawn and dusk is because of little dust particles. But in the daytime the sky is blue for a slightly different reason.
The light coming out from the sun is white – it is made up of all the colours. The different colours have different sized waves, and blue wavelengths are just the right size to be scattered by the molecules that make up the air. They are scattered in all directions making the sky blue. If there was no air on earth the sky would be black – but we wouldn’t be able to live.
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Andrea Hanvey answered on 17 Mar 2014:
Ana and Amar are right. The sunlight we see closer to the horizon is often a lighter blue or white. This is because the light reaching us has passed through more air than light from the sun over head. This means the air has scattered and re scattered the blue light in many directions so it seams lighter.
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Leah Fitzsimmons answered on 18 Mar 2014:
The guys are right that the chemicals in a planet’s atmosphere and how the sunlight refracts through the atmosphere affect what colour we see the sky as. The sky on Venus is orangey-red, black on the moon as it has no atmosphere, blue on Jupiter, it varies from red to blue on Mars and is probably yellow-ish on Saturn!
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