Why the sun appears red during sunrise and sunset?
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| Why the sun appears red during sunrise and sunset? |
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| Why the sun appears red during sunrise and sunset? |
But first thing first, let us know something about the sunlight we receive here on earth. The sunlight is not just a light of a single colour but it is the combination of many different colours. This is the same as pure white light consists of seven colours, so is the sunlight but it is not purely white, which means that sunlight doesn't contain all the seven colours. But still it contains 5-6 colours, so it is nearly white light.
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| Why the sun appears red during sunrise and sunset? |
Also, Read This - Does light has any weight? - mass of light.
So white light contains all the seven colours in it which can be checked by passing it through the prism, which split white colour light into seven different coloured lights. Similarly, all the colours of sunlight can be seen during raining in the rainbow.
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| Why the sun appears red during sunrise and sunset? |
But now the question is this that if sunlight has all these colours, then during sunrise and sunset why only red is seen?
For this, you need to understand the phenomenon of scattering of light. The scattering of light is nothing just the spreading of light in every direction. When light travelling in one direction strikes with the particles of very small diameter, then these particles spread this light in every direction. But the condition is this that the size of these particles should be comparable to the size of the wavelength of light. Let me explain this point with a simple analogy. Let us suppose there are many pumpkins on a road and road is almost filled with these. Now if on this road we perform a game of race between an elephant and a cat, then elephant can pass these pumpkin obstacles very easily but the cat has to struggle as the pumpkins are comparable to the size of the cat. So is the case with the light of different wavelengths, if particles are of almost same size as it's wavelength then it get scattered, and if the wavelength is bigger than particle size then it passes easily.
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| Why the sun appears red during sunrise and sunset? |
Now let us come to the main question i.e. how it all explain redness of sun. Now we all know that our atmosphere consists of many gases and other small particles. These particles are responsible for the scattering of sunlight. Now in general only blue colour is spread by these particles because the wavelength of blue colour is comparable to these particles and hence the sky is blue. But during sunrise and sunset, the sun is located at the horizon of the earth hence the sunlight has to travel through the more thicker atmosphere and it came across more such particles of different sizes. Now when it does so, almost all the colours got scattered by these particles except red. So only red colour light reaches us and rests get lost by scattering. Moreover, as almost all colours light got lost so the energy and power of sunlight also decrease tremendously. So we can look at the sun easily without using sunglasses.
As you know that red light doesn't get scattered easily, so red colour light is used in the traffic signal, danger signs, the signal given to aeroplane to land and many more important places.
Thanks for reading our post Why the sun appears red during sunrise and sunset? Hope you gain your knowledge about this topic and you learn an interesting topic about the science facts.
Why the sun appears red during sunrise and sunset?
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