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Asked by anon-187764 to Stewart, Marton, Laura, Kathryn on 8 Nov 2018.
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Laura Kent answered on 8 Nov 2018:
Thats a great question! The light we get from the sun is made up of all colours of the rainbow. Each colour has a different wavelength. Blue has a short wavelength and red has a long wavelength. The atmosphere on earth is made up of lots of different molecules like oxygen and nitrogen as well as dust and pollutants. So when the light travels through the atmosphere it collides the molecules. This happens a lot more with the blue light. After its collided it gets scattered back out in lots of different directions. Thats why when you look up at the sky you see all these scattered blue wavelengths.
At sunset the sun is a lot lower, and as such has to travel through a lot more of the atmosphere than it would during the day. This means it has a lot of time for the blue light to scatter off leaving the red and orange wavelengths which we see!
Have you ever tried the sunset in a bottle experiment?
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Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 8 Nov 2018:
Laura gave a brilliant answer already, but let me add one thing – we all see the sky every day and people have probably wondered about it for as long as we’ve existed, but it took until 1899 for scientists to explain it. And it took a lot of things you wouldn’t expect to need: theory of light, theory of electromagnetism, existence of atoms and molecules…
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