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Asked by gabby1996 to Carol, Ellie, John, Philip, Rebecca on 25 Jun 2012.
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John Welford answered on 25 Jun 2012:
Lots of people think the sky is blue because there is a lot of water on earth and it is reflecting that. That isn’t true though!
It took quite a long time for physicists to figure this one out. It’s actually to do with the sunlight travelling through the atmosphere and the way our eyes see light. Particles in the atmosphere scatter the different wavelengths of sunlight differently.
You might have done experiments at school where you shone a white light through a prism and saw the rainbow effect it creates. At one end you have longer wavelength colours like red and orange, and at the other end shorter wavelengths like blue and indigo.
The long wavelengths don’t scatter as much, but the shorter wavelengths scatter a lot more, making the sky appear all one colour. That colour appears as blue because the human eye is better at detecting blue than other short wavelengths.
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Philip Glasson answered on 27 Jun 2012:
The water is blue, because the sky is blue
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The sky is blue, because blue light bends more.
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Because It bends more, it rattles around (scatters) more in the atmosphere so that no matter what direction you look in ….you see blueThe red and green light tend to go straight through the atmosphere ( that’s why sun looks yellow)
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Carol White answered on 27 Jun 2012:
I was searching for a cool video to explain this and I found something even better…
… a really old video I was showed at school! It’s amazing how much better science communication is now!
[video src="http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/241.flv" /]
Comments
zugarplumfairy commented on :
i read that in a book it’s really interesting isn’t it