"If it's high-enough energy, it can scatter and go up to the atmosphere, scatter in the atmosphere and bounce back down," Mr. Eddy said.
The small gas particles in the atmosphere scatter blue light about 16 times as efficiently as they scatter red light, an effect called Rayleigh scattering.
The red colour is due to the filtering effects of the atmosphere – we see a blue sky because the atmosphere scatters blue light but allows red light through.
Molecules in the atmosphere scatter the sun's light, especially the blue end of the spectrum, because its shorter wavelengths are closer to the size of the molecules.
However, the atmosphere scatters light selectively, in a way that results in a pattern of polarization in the sky that is directly related to the position of the Sun.
Droplets of sulfuric acid spewed into the atmosphere scatter away blue light, creating vivid crimson twilights.
Then the group became aware of work by Jeremy Goodman of Princeton University pointing out that turbulence in the gases of the Milky Way would scatter the radio light--just as Earth's atmosphere scatters light from stars, making them twinkle.
The strange sight can partly be explained by the way the atmosphere scatters the light, which makes the distant mountains seem much paler – almost the same colour as the sky.
At short wavelengths (the visible spectrum) the atmosphere scatters light, thus slightly increasing the star's diameter.
That way, the fabric will scatter the visible light so that human eyes will see it, just like molecules in the atmosphere scatter the short wavelengths of blue light and make the sky look blue, Boriskina explained.
The angle through which sunlight in the atmosphere is scattered by molecules of the constituent gases varies inversely as the fourth power of the wavelength; hence, blue light, which is at the short wavelength end of the visible spectrum, will be scattered much more strongly than will the long wavelength red light.
