2023-06-03 03:06:08
In the year 2022, TripAdvisor conducted a survey to find out which were the best sunrises and sunsets in the world. The top ten of the sunsets was disputed by Mallory Square in Key West (Florida) with 9,811 mentions and Burj Khalifa (Dubai) with 5,275 mentions.
In our country there are fantastic enclaves to watch a sunset, places that go from Cape Finisterre in Galicia to Es Vedrá in Ibiza, passing through the Mirador de San Nicolás, in Granada, or the Canarian beach of Famara. Now, the place that accumulated the most reviews on TripAdvisor was the Temple of Debod, in Madrid.
The answer is in physics
The colors of the sky are the result of a mixture between the composition of the light, the atmosphere, and the physiology of Homo sapiens’ own vision. For centuries we have known that light is white, that it is made up of the colors of the rainbow and that the atmosphere is not uniform, in it there are layers of gases and particles in suspension.
When sunlight passes through the layers, it breaks down as if it were passing through a prism and when it comes into contact with the particles, it bounces and is reflected. Something similar to what happens on the planet Mars when reddish dust rises into the air and gives us the impression that the Martian sky is red.
Rayleigh scattering
Not all colors are dispersed equally, blue is dispersed more than the rest, since oxygen and nitrogen mostly absorb blue-violet light, allowing reddish-orange to pass through.
This helps explain why the sky tends to look bluer at midday than it does early in the morning or late in the evening, since the sun is at its highest point and its light passes through the atmosphere intact.
We know this physical phenomenon as Rayleigh scattering, in honor of the British mathematician and physicist John William S Rayleigh, the discoverer of argon and who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics by the Swedish Academy in 1904. Academics rewarded his studies at the field of optics, especially in the study of the polarization of light, which contributed to better understand the theory of black body radiation.
reddish sunsets
When the sun begins to disappear behind the horizon, the sky stops being bluish and is tinged with a reddish light, a picture that means that at that moment the sun’s rays pass through a larger part of the atmosphere, colliding more times with the suspended particles. in the air and the blue is “lost”.
However, with the haze the sky is colored in orange tones even though it is still daytime. In this case, it is because a cloud of dust from the Sahara envelops everything and because the suspended particles have a higher density, which causes sunlight to collide with them and reflect.
So now you know, a sunset is romantic, poetic and moving, sometimes it is indescribable and can even leave us speechless but, above all, a sunset is pure science, and if not tell the physicist British John W Rayleigh.
#sky #turn #red #sunset