Neil deGrasse Tyson

Tag

Why sky blue?

Why is the sky blue? I used to think the blue colour was caused by the refection of Earth’s waters but that’s simply not the case. It happens due to ‘Rayleigh scattering’ – explained above. Rayleigh scattering (/ˈreɪli/ RAY-lee), named after the nineteenth-century British physicist Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt),[1] is the predominantly elastic scattering of light or other electromagnetic radiation by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the radiation. For light frequencies well below the resonance frequency of the scattering particle (normal dispersion regime), the amount of scattering is inversely proportional to the fourth powerof the wavelength Astrophysicist...