Why Is the Sky Blue? The Real Science Behind Earth's Most Familiar Color
Why Is the Sky Blue? The Real Science Behind Earth's Most Familiar Color Every kid who has ever squinted up at a cloudless afternoon has asked it at some point: why is the sky blue? It sounds like a question with an obvious answer, right up until you actually try to give one. A lot of people guess it's because the sky is reflecting the ocean. It's a nice idea. It's also wrong. The sky was blue long before anyone had seen an ocean, and it's just as blue over deserts and mountain ranges a thousand miles from any coastline. The real explanation is a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering, the way sunlight interacts with the tiny molecules that make up our air. Getting there means looking at three things: what sunlight actually contains, what our atmosphere is built from, and what happens in the collision between them, roughly 100 kilometers above your head, every second of daylight. WHAT SUNLIGHT IS ACTUALLY MADE OF Sunlight looks white, but that's a bit...
