Good morning! Today's Science Solutions blog entry is to explain, without doing any research previously, why the sky is blue.
In short, the sky is blue because of reflecting light on the electromagnetic spectrum. If you didn't already know, light and waves come on a huge spectrum, ranked by wavelength and frequency of waves. Only a small part of that spectrum is visible to humans. Our brains register the light waves as color. There are seven primary colors of light that make up a rainbow - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. When an object appears to us as a certain color, it means that while all of the light waves are hitting it, it's only reflecting the light in the color we see. Basically, the sky is blue because it is absorbing light that we'd see as red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, or violet. It's reflecting the light that our brain tells us is blue. This principle goes for anything that you see as a certain color. For example, the construction paper I'm facing is absorbing light that isn't yellow and reflecting the yellow light into my eyes. If an object is black, it means that there is an absence of light waves hitting it and it appears dark and colorless. White light and color is the result of all of the colors in the visible light spectrum blending together to make one lighter color.
I didn't do any research for this specifically as we were instructed not to, but it comes from what we've been learning in science the past two weeks. We're studying optics, or the study of light and color. The unit has a lot of vocabulary and "Why is the sky blue?" is actually one of them. To be more detailed, the sky reflects the blue light because of the gases in the atmosphere and the ozone layer. Other planets and satellites don't have that type of protection from the sun's radiation, so their skies would appear a different color to us if we were on them. Some planets, such as Saturn, have atmospheres, but no ozone layers. Saturn's sky would look orange to us if it were ever possible to stand on it, but that's an entirely different field of science. It's interesting to me how they tend to cross over into each other.
In short, the sky is blue because of reflecting light on the electromagnetic spectrum. If you didn't already know, light and waves come on a huge spectrum, ranked by wavelength and frequency of waves. Only a small part of that spectrum is visible to humans. Our brains register the light waves as color. There are seven primary colors of light that make up a rainbow - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. When an object appears to us as a certain color, it means that while all of the light waves are hitting it, it's only reflecting the light in the color we see. Basically, the sky is blue because it is absorbing light that we'd see as red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, or violet. It's reflecting the light that our brain tells us is blue. This principle goes for anything that you see as a certain color. For example, the construction paper I'm facing is absorbing light that isn't yellow and reflecting the yellow light into my eyes. If an object is black, it means that there is an absence of light waves hitting it and it appears dark and colorless. White light and color is the result of all of the colors in the visible light spectrum blending together to make one lighter color.
I didn't do any research for this specifically as we were instructed not to, but it comes from what we've been learning in science the past two weeks. We're studying optics, or the study of light and color. The unit has a lot of vocabulary and "Why is the sky blue?" is actually one of them. To be more detailed, the sky reflects the blue light because of the gases in the atmosphere and the ozone layer. Other planets and satellites don't have that type of protection from the sun's radiation, so their skies would appear a different color to us if we were on them. Some planets, such as Saturn, have atmospheres, but no ozone layers. Saturn's sky would look orange to us if it were ever possible to stand on it, but that's an entirely different field of science. It's interesting to me how they tend to cross over into each other.
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