The Sun is NOT Yellow! #shorts

The sun is yellow, or is it? You're used to seeing a happy yellow circle floating in a blue sky, but that's fake news. If you placed a prism in a sunbeam in space, you'd see that the sun radiates light in every color of the visible spectrum. If these colors were paints mixed together, you'd get black. But with light, mixing them produces white, the true color of sunlight.

So why does it look yellow to us? Let's replace the prism with a slice of Earth's atmosphere. Here, nitrogen and oxygen molecules scatter sunlight in all directions. This makes our sky blue, as the blue light with shorter wavelengths scatters more than red light. If scattering didn't happen, the sky would always be a transparent window to the stars.

But because the sky has taken some of the blue, sunlight appears yellow to us. The effect is strongest at sunrise and sunset when there's more atmosphere between you and the sun, making even red light scatter and dyeing the sky orange. Red light can also be scattered by things like water vapor and soot particles, making ocean sunsets even more amazing.