Answer 1:
White light from the sun passes through air
fairly well, but there is a lot of air between
here and the outer reaches of the atmosphere, and
some of the light gets scattered. Scattering
means that the light waves get their direction
changed by the molecules and dust particles in the
air. The thing is, all waves have something
called wavelength, which is a measure of
the distance between the crests of the waves. The
wavelength of red light is the longest, and
blue light has the shortest wavelength,
with orange, yellow, green, blue and indigo in
between. The key to this answer is that short
wavelengths scatter better from small things than
long wavelengths do. If we have lots of tiny
things floating about in the water or air, like
the tiny dots of fat and protein in the milk or
tiny dust particles in the air, the blue-ish light
gets scattered quite a lot, but the red-ish light
gets scattered less.
Take a breath, I know this is a long
answer....
Lots of white light sets out from the sun and
passes through the atmosphere. The deeper it gets,
the more of the blue light gets scattered away
from its original path. By the time it reaches the
ground the white light has gone a bit yellowish,
the color of what we call 'sunlight'. The
blue light just bounces about, getting scattered
like crazy, and all we see, instead of the starry
diamond skies we see a big blue haze, which we
call the sky.
There are a couple of other things you might
like to know about this. When the sun gets really
low in the sky, the light has to go through much
more air, which is why the sun looks bright red
(never look at the sun directly unless it's
very low, near to sunset - you could go
blind). Ever wondered why clouds are
white? The droplets of water of which clouds
are made are much bigger than the wavelength of
red light, so it gets scattered just as much as
the blue light does, so all of the white light
scatters, not just the blue part.
Just take a look at this web site; it has it
all answered
sky blue .
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