this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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Grok is this true? Why is the sunset on mars blue?
I would guess it's essentially the same effect that causes our blue sky in the day and red sky at dawn and dusk. TL;DR if you already know what Rayleigh scattering is, skip to the last paragraph
Okay so the reason that we can "see" the sky, as in it is lit up and has colour, is that sunlight (which is basically white) gets scattered when it passes through the atmosphere instead of just going straight through. This is an effect called Rayleigh scattering. Rayleigh scattering affects shorter wavelengths more than longer ones.
If there is too much scattering of a wavelength, chances are that most of it will not make it to a given observer. It'll either just wind up going off into space or being absorbed by something. During daytime, our atmosphere does this just enough to get rid of most of the ultraviolet light. The next frequency down is blue, which gets scattered enough for us to see it.
For the sky directly above you to appear blue to you, you need some of the blue wavelengths of light to have made it to that point above you and then get scattered there. Other wavelengths need to have either been absorbed already (like UV) or not scattered much yet (like red).
During sunsets and sunrises, the light has to pass through much more atmosphere to get to us than it does during the day. As a result, the blue light starts to meet the same fate that UV does during the day, and longer wavelengths like yellow and red are the only ones that make it to us
So, all that is to set up that Mars has a way thinner atmosphere which does way less scattering. The sky normally looks more or less the same colour as the ground because there's so little Rayleigh scattering happening that dust kicked up by the wind dominates the colour instead. However, same rules apply as on Earth - sunset means more scattering. It's just that on Mars, that goes from UV scattering to blue, instead of blue to red.
Thats a great explanation. Science is dope