If the sun is yellow, why are clouds white? (How can anything look white with yellow light shining on it?)
by 
purplecows
ANSWERS: 3
-
the colors we see are just the bits of the light spectrum that an object does not absorb. grass is green because the cells absorb all the light except what is in the green frequency range, and that light bounces off into our eyes. in the case of clouds, no light is absorbed and we get all the colors. the light from the sun is not actually yellow - else we would see a yellow tint on everything.
-
our sun is so many colors that we can only see few of them bouncing back at a given moment
-
Sunlight is whiter than it appears for the same reason the sky is blue: Blue light gets scattered, shifting the apparent color of the sun from white to yellow. Clouds are white, i.e., they reflect all wavelengths more or less equally. When you look at a cloud, you're seeing it illuminated by the apparently yellowish sun PLUS you're seeing the blue that would have appeared in that patch of the sky had the cloud not been there. In effect, the yellow sunlight diffused by the cloud and the blue scattered light are recombined to make white. The overall effect is a white cloud. Good question!
RELATED QUESTIONS
Copyright 2023, Wired Ivy, LLC