My five year old son would like to know ,why is the sky blue?
Answers:
OK. First you need to know the answer yourself.
Might be a surprise, but Einstein was the person who "explained this." It has to do with the way sunlight is scattered by the molecules in the atmosphere. Blue light scatters more than red (Tyndall effect also known as Rayleigh scattering), so more blue light reaches our eye. There is an excellent description at the website listed below (look at the cartoon and it will be pretty clear). It is not a reflection from the ocean. And it isn't just water molecules that cause the effect.
I'd suggest that you find a prism and show your son how white light turns into a rainbow. Even if this doesn't answer the blue sky question, it will point your child toward a fascinating part of the physcial world and keep that questioning interest alive.
Aloha
that is a whole science answer. too long to explain he is a little kid he doesnt need to know y. just tell him nobody knows. tell him he is gay.
Here you go:
When the sunlight is filtered through the atmosphere, blue is the only color that gets trapped.
reflections of the oceans
Because the grass is green?!
it isnt it just looks like it
its the reflection off the surface water on our atmosphere. My kids asked the same thing.lol
Because nitrogen molecules just happen to refract light in the blue part of the spectrum more than any other wavelength.
Doug
Tell his God liked that colour!
it just is, sometimes there are white clouds in the sky as well
Because purple clashed with the drapes.
just tell him that the Creater made it that way.
This question has beenasked many a time, the short is that really the sky coulours are mainly red, but we only see the blue part. There is a whole page or two relating to this, folow the link, al the best
It's the reflection off the sea xx
not sure! but i have some explanations 4 when it rains, thunders, and theres lightening
rain: god's watering his flowers
thunder: god's moving his furniture round
lightening: gods light bulb so hes just changing it
im not religious but these worked with my kids and everyones elses!
It's actually every color, but blue light is the "strongest" color, so it gets through to our eyes. (This is the same reason why some people have blue eyes.)
To be perfectly clear: It is NOT the reflection of the oceans on our atmosphere.
It's because different colors of light are different wave lengths, and blue is the length that bounces back in such a way that it is the only one visible. This changes when the sun sets, in that the angle of the sun makes the different colored light waves bounce back in such a way that we can then see the colors of the sunset.
The explanation is probably waay too complicated for the kid. When you are five, it's really hard to understand long, scientific explanations.
Just give him a simple answer like, "It just is. No one really knows why, dear."
unless your child is scientific genius, don't go into lengthy discussion of how it happens, you'll loose his attention span.any creative answer is good at this age...just don't go over board and make it short. get use to these questions and when you actually know the answer and he's ready, tell him. when he's older the two of you could even investigate the answers together
tell him because the sea is blue and its the same colour and this!:D
Two ways to answer that question.
1. Different wavelenghts of light reflect differently from the sun depending on the angle the light is coming at earth. We get blue during the day and red/orange during dusk and dawn.
2. If I told you the sky was green and the grass was blue, you won't know any better. So just take it as fact.
cause the sea is blue
The refraction of the water droplets in the sky. To make it simple, the sun reflects off of the water drops in the air and goes back into the sky.
The sky is really black, like when you see it at night. It's because the sun isn't there to provide light to reflect the water.
The lord made it that way.
The answer is simple and can be explained with the help of Raman Effect. However, the challenge is to explain it to a 5-year-old child.
I think instead of explaining through words, you should do a small experiment for him. Buy a prism and show him how it can break white sunlight into different colours on a sheet of white paper.
Then tell him that the sky is full of dust and particles that also make sunlight split in the same way and that most other colours of light are lost and only the "bluish" colours that are at the one extreme end of the spectrum manage to reach us.
Hard one this. Tell him it's to match his lovely eyes. Hopefully they are not brown
it's the reflection of the water, but if there was no water then you could see right through into space like it is in the night.
First of all I'd just like to correct some of my fellow child-psychotherapy-PhDs up there: kids have an amazing ability to learn and can understand more stuff than you can imagine. They are only limited in the amount of background information they know, and not knowing doesn't have anything to do with comprehending complexity. In fact, if your 5-year-old knew just as much science as you did, s/he would probably understand complex scientific reasoning much faster than you would.
Now back to your kid's question:
The sun sends us white light as you surely know, which is composed of the seven colors of the spectrum. When this light enters our atmosphere, each color gets scattered by a certain amount (and is hence more visible). Violet and blue are the two colors that are scattered the most (this is entirely due to our atmosphere's composition). The sky looks blue and not violet because of a problem with our eyes (who guessed that would turn out to be the answer) which "see" more blue than violet. But anyway that's just a little scienfitic tidbit not very commonly known among non-scientific-folks (i.e. not geeks).
Try to simplify this as much as you can and tell it to your child. Remember that using metaphors is the best thing you can do to help him/her understand. Oh, and you might wanna lose the eye problem thing.
Good grief, you're getting a lot of wrong answers.
Water is clear. Just like in the bathtub. Oceans look blue because the sky looks blue, not the other way around.
The sciencemadesimple link was a very good one. For goodness sake, don't tell your kid that no one knows, because that's a lie. Set a good example by saying that you didn't know at first, so you looked it up.
I think the simplest explaination is that light of different colors all act a little bit differently, and when hits all the molecules of the atmosphere, like the oxygen we breathe in, and the CO2 we breathe out, it scatters all over the sky, so we can see it, and that blue ligth scatters best, which makes the sky blue. When the sun sets, there's more atmosphere, so the other colors that don't scatter as well do start scattering, so the sky looks other colors.
That's not strictly true, but it's pretty close.
Water in the atmosphere does not absorb blue and green light wavelengths, there quick and easy for your little nipper. Better explain that light is made of different coulours first.
Because, the molecules in the air scatter more blue light than red light. When we look at the sunset we see red and orange light because the blue light has been scattered away.
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