Jakarta –
If we ask about the color Paradise, most people will answer that the sky is blue. But is it really so?
The sky decorated with white clouds and birds singing looks blue to our eyes. However, the sky isn’t just blue.
According to science, the colors of the sky imply the properties of light, atoms and molecules, and the earth’s atmosphere.
What makes the sky blue?
When we look at the sky, do we see blue nitrogen or blue oxygen? The simple answer is neither. Instead, the blue light we see is diffuse sunlight.
The sun produces a broad spectrum of visible light. The light we see as white actually includes all the colors of the rainbow.
When sunlight passes through the air, atoms and molecules in the atmosphere scatter blue light in all directions, much more than red light. This is called Rayleigh scattering. Described on the Science Alert page, the scattering eventually produces a white sun and Paradise blue on sunny days.
As the sun sets, we can see this effect play. Because sunlight has to go through more air to reach us. When the Sun is near the horizon, almost all of the blue light is scattered or absorbed by the dust, so we see the red Sun surrounded by blue colors.
But if all we see is diffuse sunlight, what color is the sky really? Perhaps we can have an answer in the evening.
The true color of the sky
If we look at the night sky, it is clear that it is dark, but not pitch dark. Of course there was light from the stars, but the night sky was bright.
On a dark moonless night in the countryside, away from city lights, you can see trees and hills shining in the sky. This light, called airflow, is produced by atoms and molecules in the atmosphere.
In visible light, oxygen produces green and red light, hydroxyl (OH) molecules produce red light, and sodium produces yellow.
The different colors of the air currents are the result of atoms and molecules releasing specific amounts of energy (Quantas) in the form of light. For example, at high altitudes ultraviolet light can split oxygen molecules (O2) into pairs of oxygen atoms, and when these atoms recombine into molecular oxygen, they produce a distinct green light.
So the sky isn’t just blue. In Paradise on a clear night, the sky will mix with green, yellow and red. The color is produced by diffuse sunlight, oxygen and sodium from shooting stars.
Watch a video “4 sky phenomena that will happen in December 2022“
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(nir/friend)
