Why are the colors of the sky at sunrise different at sunset?
Asked by: Jesse Jordan
Answer
Dust in the atmosphere can by scattering produce very interesting sky colours. The redness of Mars is due to lots of dust in its atmosphere. At Earth, during the day, activity on the ground stirs up dust into the air, which scatters
the light when we see it at sunset. At night the dust settles, so we see less scattering by
dust in the morning at the sunrise, so different colours in the sky.
Answered by: Paul Hodgkinson, Physics Undergrad. Cambridge University, UK.
'The strength and weakness of physicists is that we believe in what we can measure. And if we can't measure it, then we say it probably doesn't exist. And that closes us off to an enormous amount of phenomena that we may not be able to measure because they only happened once. For example, the Big Bang. ... That's one reason why they scoffed at higher dimensions for so many years. Now we realize that there's no alternative... '