Why Is The Sky Blue?

“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true”

~ Lyman Frank Baum

So this week at one of my extracurricular activities that I do, this question came up: why is the sky blue? Of course, being the nerds we are, we had to find out what this means and since now I have to have a thesis for every blog post that I do, this is what I am going to answer or prove correct or whatever else you want to call it. So here it is...

The sky is blue because of the bending of the light rays from the sun. (Wow that sounds so nerdy.)

Everyone knows about the electromagnetic spectrum, right? You know the song that goes like this? Radio, Micro, Infer red, visible, ultra violet, x-rays, gamma rays. These are the rays of the electromagnetic spectrum. (Ringing any bells?) Well, I am just going to focus on the visible rays.

Everyone knows the rays/colors in the visible spectrum. They are ROYGBIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Well, red rays are polar opposites compared to the violet rays. (That is why red is at the beginning and violet is at the end. Just in case you were wondering.) These rays are measured in amstums or nanometers. There is one anstrum in a 10th nanometer or 10^-10 meter. So here is some information on red and violet and how they are so different.

Red

·         700 nanometers

·         high wavelength

·         low frequency

·         bends less

Violet

·         400 nanometers

·         low wavelength

·         high frequency

·         bends more

So, when the light rays from the sun enter our atmosphere, they all bend at a certain rate and the one that our eyes pick up the most is the blue because it bends more, but then why do we see reds and oranges at sunset or sunrise? Well, when the sun is lower or on the horizon or whatever you call it, the light rays still bend at the same rate, but the red does not bend as much as the blue rays so we see the red more because comes in our atmosphere in a straight line compared to the blue rays that bend and hit the ground before we even see them.

I hope that made sense. Anyways, so in conclusion, you see the sky as a blue sky because of the angle of refraction and because of how much it bends too.

Sorry for the randomness of this topic, but I thought it was really cool. Also, sorry if I get any of this wrong. I do not know everything about this so it might be wrong, but I am pretty sure I am correct. Anyways, this topic really made me start thinking about how everything works and how our eye perceives it. My teacher for this extracurricular activity said that colors might not be real so I guess I might blog about that next week since I am over my 500 words for this week.

Bye guys! Thanks for taking your time to read this!