Why is the Sun Yellow and the Sky Blue?

The Sun looks yellow because of how light travels through Earth’s air, and the sky looks blue because of how that same light bounces around in our atmosphere.

Light is like a rainbow, it has many colors inside it. When we look at the Sun, it's actually white, but when its light comes all the way to us, something happens on the way. Earth’s air acts like a kind of filter: it lets some colors pass through more easily than others.

Imagine you're in a room full of bouncy balls, each color is a different ball. The blue balls bounce around a lot and keep hitting other balls, making the whole room look blue from outside. That’s kind of like what happens with our sky: Earth's air makes blue light bounce all over the place, so we see it everywhere above us.

Meanwhile, the yellow balls (from the Sun) are less bouncy, they travel straight to us and that’s why the Sun looks yellow when we look at it directly. It’s like seeing a flashlight through a cloud: some colors get scattered, others go straight through!