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Comment on The colour of the Sun is white

It is white when seen from space. Here on Earth, the atmosphere disperses the blue part of the spectrum so that the blue sunlight comes to our eyes from all directions, making the sky blue. Without the blue light, the sun appears more yellow. So the color depends on your point of view :)

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FirstWizardZorander@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Wow, that’s really interesting! I had no idea that the atmosphere worked as a diffuser for only a small part of the spectrum like that

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- Dave@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  xkcd.com/1145/
  
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- theamigan@lemmy.dynatron.me ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Rayleigh scattering
  
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- scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yep the atmosphere is transparent to all colors of light except blue. It doesn’t absorb blue light but it does get scattered. That’s why no matter where you look in the sky, you see blue. Because the gasses there are scattering blue light in all directions, including toward you.
  
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  - vector_zero@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Isn’t that because blue is higher frequency and therefore refracts more than the other colors?
    
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    scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Good question. No idea. If higher frequency correlates with more scattering, then UV should also be scattered, right? Or is it something about blue visible light being just right for our kid of gases? Interesting question since that mix has changed over time. Perhaps the sky was another color during life’s early years. Is that why they’re called the Cyanobacteria? Because they turned the sky blue?
    
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brlemworld@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It’s weird that diagrams and models of our solar system still depict the sun as yellow.

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- Zoidberg@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Unless you’re a kid in Japan, in which case it’s depicted as red.
  
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