Ancient philosophers puzzled over the question, 'Why is the sky blue?' Now we know it's all down to Rayleigh scattering.
This blackness is easy enough to understand. Unless you're looking directly at the, there's no reason for the sky to be illuminated at all. The real puzzle is why it's illuminated down here on the surface of the planet — a longstanding mystery that wasn't fully explained until the end of the 19th century.
The key lies in an effect known as Rayleigh scattering, after its discoverer Lord Rayleigh. This refers to the way light bounces off small particles, up to about a tenth the wavelength of the light itself — which includes the molecules making upRayleigh showed that longer wavelengths, corresponding to the red end of the spectrum, aren't scattered as strongly as short wavelengths like blue and violet.
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