![]() But we have to be careful, because high energy light, like X-ray or UV light, can be very harmful!įor example, the sun generates a lot of really intense UV light that would burn us very easily if it had the chance. There are also X-rays (which we use to look at our bones and teeth), ultraviolet (UV) light, microwaves and radio light (which we use for communication). The light we see with our eyes is just one type of light in the universe. We couldn’t survive without it! And that very gas you pull into your lungs is the exact same gas that is responsible for scattering the sun’s blue light to make our sky during the day. With each breath, you pull a little bit of the atmosphere into your lungs. Helping and protecting usīut that’s not all the sky is! It’s also the air we breathe and our protection from space. This is the sky I really look forward to seeing. This makes the atmosphere mostly invisible to us, and we get to enjoy a beautiful sky full of stars. ![]() (Unsplash/Quino Al)Īt night, however, it’s a different story: the sun is hidden behind the Earth, which means there is no sunlight to be scattered by our atmosphere. The light from the sun is made up of all the colours of the rainbow from red through blue. Normally, when you see Saturn in the sky with your eyes, it looks like a bright star - but when you look at it with a telescope, all of the sudden it’s a whole other world! It blew my mind that it was just hanging out there in the deep vastness of space: I had to learn more. I remember the first time I looked at Saturn through a telescope. And depending on the time of day and the conditions in the atmosphere, we will see different things.Īs an astrophysicist, I’m particularly interested in the sky, because it’s my job to learn about the different things we find there. ![]() That layer, which we call an atmosphere, is stuck to our planet, Earth, by an invisible force called gravity, and we are at the bottom of it. The reason the sky can appear to be so many different things is because what we perceive as the sky is actually just the different behaviours of a massive layer of gas above our heads. It can also be full of stars, or full of orange and red clouds at sunset or sunrise. What is the sky really? It’s interesting because the sky can be so many different things to us: it can be big, beautiful and blue, or grey, cloudy and rainy. Have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Send it to is the sky? - Pearl, 12, Regina, Sask. ![]() Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. ![]()
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