Wednesday, 18 January 2023 | 12:17
Aulia Hafisa
Sky Illustration (Pixabay)

TheIndonesia.id - How often do you look at the sky? Have you ever wondered why the sky is blue? This question might be asked by many curious people. So, to find the answer, here are the explanations given by NASA. 

Quoting Space Place NASA, when sunlight reaches the Earth's atmosphere, it is scattered in all directions by all the gases and particles in the air.

Blue light is a color that is scattered more than any other color because it travels as shorter and smaller waves. It is the reason why we see a blue sky most of the time.

First, to understand why the sky is blue, we need to understand the concept of light waves. It is explained by NASA that the light that comes from the sun is white light. However, that light is actually made up of all the different spectrums of color, just like a rainbow.

Sunlight reaches the earth's atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all the gases and particles. Likewise, blue light is scattered in all directions by small molecules in the earth's atmosphere, such as oxygen, nitrogen, etc.

Light also has an energy that moves in waves, or it can be called wave energy. Some light travels in short, "wavy" waves.

As for other light, it travels in long waves. Red is light with the longest wavelengths and blue light has shorter waves.

There is an opinion that the color of the sky is caused by the reflection of the seas' and oceans' color. In fact, NASA explains that sunlight that has reached the Earth's atmosphere has gone through scattering, or deflection of light through molecules in the air.

Sky illustration (Francesco Ungaro/Pexels)

Because sunlight has passed through all of this air, the air molecules scatter the blue light back many times in many directions.

In addition, the Earth's surface is also influential in reflecting and scattering light. All this scattering then mixes all the colors together and makes white more dominant than blue.