Why is air invisible

Learn more. Why is air invisible? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 11 months ago. Active 4 years ago. Viewed 7k times. What about other gases and fumes which are visible? Improve this question. Manishearth Kit Kit 1, 1 1 gold badge 18 18 silver badges 26 26 bronze badges.

Why is the sky blue? Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Jerry Schirmer Jerry Schirmer The optical band fits neatly into a deep trough.

Also, are those absorption peaks still valid when you go from liquid water to vapor, anyway? Water clearly has very different optics from water vapor. I agree with you. I think that vapor and liquid have rough the same properties discounting droplets, which obviously have a macroscopic refractive behavior.

Show 7 more comments. Omega Centauri Omega Centauri 2, 12 12 silver badges 10 10 bronze badges. Dmytry Dmytry 4 4 silver badges 7 7 bronze badges. Hermione Hermione 21 1 1 bronze badge. Boy S Boy S 1, 13 13 silver badges 24 24 bronze badges. Not that you're wrong or anything, but I suspect the OP is looking for some micro-physics I was thinking about discussing particle size; particle spacing; the lack of free charges; and atomic and molecular absorption spectra.

But I'm not sure I can be right enough for my own satisfaction. Lindsay Lindsay 31 2 2 bronze badges. Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Visit chat. Linked 2. Related 2. For us to see an object, we need light. After light has hit an object, some of the colors will be absorbed by it, and other colors will be reflected by it. Those colors that are reflected by the object travel to your eyeball and are interpreted by your brain.

What this means is that if you see a red firetruck, then that object has reflected red light into your eyes, but it has absorbed all of the other colors of light that have hit it.

Human beings do not see every possible wave of light that exists. Instead, there is a narrow range of light that we can see, and that is dependent on the frequency and wavelength of the light. If you imagine looking at a beach ball floating on the waves in the ocean, frequency tells us how fast the ball is going up and down, while the wavelength tells us the distance between the top of two waves. More Ask a Scientist: How can a phone take a picture?

More Ask a Scientist: How do plants grow? For humans, the visible light spectrum lies between violet light with a wavelength of around nanometers and red light with a wavelength of around nanometers. But there are other types of light that we know of that we cannot see with our eyes, but we can detect.

Some examples would include X-rays wavelength of 10 nanometers , ultraviolet light wavelength of nanometers , and infrared light wavelength of over nanometers.

Since our eyes can only see within a very narrow range on the color spectrum, anything that we are able to see must be reflecting light that fits within that range. For air, it turns out that the colors that are able to be reflected do not lie in that visible range.