Yellow? Green? White? 🤔🌞
Many people believe that the sun is yellow. However, the sun emits light that encompasses all the colors that our eyes can perceive and thus appears white to our eyes. When we see a rainbow, we witness the sunlight being split into its different colors. The passage of sunlight through a prism also reveals its diverse color spectrum.
Why Does the Sun Appear Yellow to Our Eyes?
This is due to the Earth’s atmosphere scattering the shorter-wavelength colors such as green, blue, and violet more strongly. When sunlight reaches the Earth’s atmosphere, it interacts with the gases and particles present in the air and gets scattered in various directions. Among the different colors of light, blue light is scattered to a greater extent compared to others. This is due to the fact that blue light travels as shorter, smaller waves, making it more susceptible to scattering effects in the atmosphere. This means we lose some of the blue tint of the sun as sunlight passes through the atmosphere. Consequently, only the longer-wavelength colors like yellow and red reach our eyes. This phenomenon is called Rayleigh scattering.
During sunrise or sunset, when the sun is positioned low in the sky, it can even take on an orange or red hue. The sunlight passes through a greater amount of atmosphere, so even more blue light is scattered and consequently, a larger proportion of the longest wavelength light (red) reaches our eyes.