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Universe Pale Turquoise, On Average

Posted by timothy on from the slashdot's-cosmic-color-scheme dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "AP is reporting that the average color of the universe is a "sprightly" turquoise-green. If only they'd known before the new iMacs came out! Link is to Salon.com."

49 comments

  1. First Proust! by Snowfox · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

    1. Re:First Proust! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

      Bad pun. Good quote, on topic, even intelligent, but a bad bad pun. Somebody mod this guy offtopic. We don't need no funny boys here.

  2. Pale blue dot? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is our entire universe just a pale blue dot in another creature's universe?

  3. Color flamewars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    CNN calls it pale green

  4. Little known fact by PD · · Score: 3, Informative

    Our sun is actually pale green in color. So that's yet another thing that makes us average.

    --
    If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
    1. Re:Little known fact by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I looked at it and it's definitely yellowish. It's green when I close my eyes or stare at a wall...

    2. Re:Little known fact by PD · · Score: 3, Informative

      Check the website: here

      --
      If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
    3. Re:Little known fact by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      I looked again, and, durn it, it's yellowish.

      BTW, how long until these retinal after-images wear off?

    4. Re:Little known fact by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The website you're linking to says that it is correct to claim that the color of the Sun is green because the Sun's peak wavelength is in the green part of the visible spectrum.

      Bullshit.

      Start with any light whose energy is broad on the spectrum, add a low energy but very narrowly focused spike of green, and these guys would call the color "green" because of a single spike on a spectrogram. Color perception is computed by an integral of intensity over wavelength, not by looking at the highest intensity peek.

      Please stop trying to be interesting by repeating misleading nonsense that is only true when distorting the most technical jargon.

    5. Re:Little known fact by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 4, Informative

      Bullshit.

      Start with any light whose energy is broad on the spectrum, add a low energy but very narrowly focused spike of green, and these guys would call the color "green" because of a single spike on a spectrogram. Color perception is computed by an integral of intensity over wavelength, not by looking at the highest intensity peek.

      To nit-pick, because it's 1:30am and I'm bored:

      The sun's emission spectrum is a blackbody curve. Most of its light emission is near the high-frequency end of this curve. Thus, if the peak is in the green range, most of the rest of its light emission will be *near* that range.

      While I agree that the sun doesn't look green ("yellow-white" was the term used by the FAQ referred to previously), to say that the argument is completely misleading is silly. This isn't a little, narrow spike - it's a great big wide peak at the crest of a quickly rising curve.

      And on that note, I'm going to bed.

    6. Re:Little known fact by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fascinating. Were you contacted by seti first, or are you just lurking?

      Is window glass a solid or liquid?

    7. Re:Little known fact by AndrewRUK · · Score: 1

      It looks yellow, yes. But, all the blue comes from the sun (the blue light from the sun is scattered in the upper atmosphere, which is why the sky is blue.) And what do you get if you combine yellow and blue? Yes, that's right, green!

    8. Re:Little known fact by Jonathunder · · Score: 4, Funny

      Only on slashdot can one read a flamewar between intelligent people on what color the sun is.

      What color is the sun in YOUR world?

    9. Re:Little known fact by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Then why does it ALSO appear yellow-white from space?

  5. Color swatch according to the article by ghamerly · · Score: 1

    The article points out that the RGB triple is (0.269, 0.388, 0.342). Assuming this is out of a scale from 0->1, and scaling to 0->255, we get values (69, 99, 87) (roughly), or 0x456357. This gives a color swatch that looks like this. The background of this box is the color they claim... seems kinda dark compared to their description.

    1. Re:Color swatch according to the article by ghamerly · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Ok, so I accidentally hit "submit" for the above when I meant to hit preview. Obviously color doesn't work in slashdot. Here's a link to what this looks like: http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~ghamerly/universe_color.ht ml

    2. Re:Color swatch according to the article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      seems kinda dark

      Why are you surprised? The night sky is mostly... black. Actually I think that their RGB triple (0.269, 0.388, 0.342) is out of a scale 0->255. Thus giving the color 0x000000 after rounding.

    3. Re:Color swatch according to the article by mph · · Score: 1

      The R, G, and B values are normalized so that the sum is 1. The concept of "brightness" doesn't really mean anything in the context of the result.

    4. Re:Color swatch according to the article by gnovos · · Score: 2

      69, 99, 87

      The color fo slashdot... freaky.

      --
      "Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
    5. Re:Color swatch according to the article by Yottabyte84 · · Score: 1

      How about a link? Slashdot doesn't allow whatever tag you used in comments. Next time try the preview button. (not that I ever do)

    6. Re:Color swatch according to the article by jo42 · · Score: 1

      So, how long before Microsoft starts using that as the default background color of Windows?

  6. It's nice to know by ninewands · · Score: 4, Funny

    that Mother Nature's decorating tastes are stuck in the 1950's.

    --
    utter rubbish
  7. Indians knew this, I bet by imrdkl · · Score: 1

    One wonders if the indians have always understood this. Some northern Arizona/NM tribes have used the various shades of turquoise as money and adornment, as well as in religious and artistic creations for a long time. In fact, they consider themselves to be turquoise (not red), according to an article I found.

    1. Re:Indians knew this, I bet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Or perhaps it could be because turquoise is abundant in the south west and stands out against the brown and red rock of the desert. Humans love rare, shiny things and turquoise was the SW tribes' version of gold.

  8. My T-shirt by dankjones · · Score: 3, Funny
    I have a T-shirt that is a lovely shade of 420 MeV and, I think, a rather tasefull spin correlation coefficient that highlights my dandieness.

    1. Re:My T-shirt by caffeinated_bunsen · · Score: 1

      420 MeV?! Strange, most of my clothing is largely transparent to high energy gamma radiation. I'd sure like to see whatever material reflects photons of that energy.

      --

      Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
    2. Re:My T-shirt by YU+Nicks+NE+Way · · Score: 2

      It's a REALLY heavy metal T-shirt, I guess.

  9. iMacs by jensend · · Score: 1

    If only they'd known before the new iMacs came out!

    Implication being that God "thought different"? Or is that "thunk different" in Apple advertising grammar, since it's "think different" instead of "think differently"?

  10. The Color of the Universe by Trinn · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well, given that the colors are indeed given as normed values, essentially all they give us is a hue and a saturation, no luminosity. Assuming a full luminosity (highest given # is is equal to FF), it easily computes to:
    RED:0xB1
    GREEN:0xFF
    BLUE:0xE1
    I used the WinXP Powertoys calculator...and actually, it gives decimals...err....well, it puts a . into hex numbers and gives you what probably amounts to 1/16, 1/256, etc. places after it....just in case anyone's interested.
    --me(who else?)

    1. Re:The Color of the Universe by coyote-san · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This means that the HTML encoding (e.g,. in "bgcolor") is "#B1FFE1" - script kiddie biff'.

      My God, this means that the universe is someone's middle-school science faire project... and God himself is said student.

      It explains so much!....

      --
      For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
    2. Re:The Color of the Universe by jwilhelm · · Score: 1

      Hehe, wow, amazing... you got points for that EVEN THOUGH you said you used Windows XP!! It really is a kinder gentler /. :)

  11. Isn't it obvious, really? by PhilHibbs · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They're talking about the visible spectrum, which is a slice out of a much broader range of frequencies. If you take an arbitrary slice out of an evenly distributed set of data, you would expect the average to be right in the middle, which is roughly where turquoise lies, so surely this is statistical nonsense.

    1. Re:Isn't it obvious, really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Those little green men who visited me last week were really in transgalactic camo!

    2. Re:Isn't it obvious, really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They didn't average the numerical values of frequencies or wavelengths, they "combined" them. Take red and blue. Averaging their wavelengths gives green which is nonsense, combining red and blue gives magenta.

      I suggest that you read about human color perception. About light spectra being infinite dimensional, about the sensitivity curves of the human eye sensors that reduce the perceived color space to 3 dimensions, and noting that spectral colors can be put on a line (1 dimension), and so are not all the perceived colors (e.g. magenta is missing from the rainbow). Then you'll understand that mixing colors doesn't mean averaging their wavelengths.

    3. Re:Isn't it obvious, really? by PhilHibbs · · Score: 2

      I think I know what you mean... that's one thing that really annoys me about what I was taught at school in physics. They said that light is a combination of red, green, and blue. Bullshit. I now know that that's only an accident of the placement of the human eye's receptors in the spectrum. Some people have sensors that are closer together, giving colour blindness, and a few rare women have four different receptors (tetrachromats, I think the word is - /. story here). Thanks for pointing that out, though, sometimes those lies that I was told confuse me.

  12. Ok by Lord_Of_The_Beer · · Score: 1

    So I understand Red and Blue shifting, Does this mean I now have to understand green shifting as well.

    (Greeen shifting when you and an object are not moveing closer or away from one another)

    --
    D.A.K.D.A.E.---- Deny all Knowledge, Destroy All Evidence
  13. In related news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    The IIDA, International Interior Decorators Association, has started to lobby NASA and Congress for funds to purchase paint, rollers and brushes with. They are claiming that this horrid turquoise color is just not the image that we as an up coming species want to present to the Universe. They plan on using more lively, vibrant colors in the redecorated galaxy.

  14. This is.... useless by cadallin451 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    How did this tell us anything we didn't already know? Aside from the "visible" spectrum being a small and arbitrary slice of the pie (woo, it's what humans can see, it must be important) we already knew that the majority of stars are massive bright blue ones, because the universe isn't out of large clouds of hydrogen for massive stars to form yet. Therefore it's obvious that the average of all visible light would be greenish.

    This discovery is like proclaiming the "average" of all the atoms currently existing is carbon or oxygen, its moronic.

    1. Re:This is.... useless by TACD · · Score: 1
      This discovery is like proclaiming the "average" of all the atoms currently existing is carbon or oxygen, its moronic

      Yes, that would be moronic, since the most common atom is hydrogen. Tee hee hee.

      --
      Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
    2. Re:This is.... useless by at_18 · · Score: 2

      we already knew that the majority of stars are massive bright blue ones, because the universe isn't out of large clouds of hydrogen for massive stars to form yet.

      Actually, the vast majority of stars are little and, with very low luminosity, all of them invisible to the naked eye. The 'mass function' (the relative percentage of stars of different mass) gives something like 100 little red stars for every blue monster. There are luminous red stars, but they are just blue monsters getting old.

      As a side note, almost all the stars that you can see in the night are luminosity monsters, apart from a few ones ( Alpha centauri). Sirius is one of the weakest, because it's equivalent to "only" 8 suns. There are stars as luminous as 50,000 suns ( Deneb, Canopus)

    3. Re:This is.... useless by amRadioHed · · Score: 1
      woo, it's what humans can see, it must be important
      Visible light is important to us. Tell me, who is it not important to?
      --
      We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
  15. Egads by hrieke · · Score: 2

    Kermit the Frog was right, 'It's not easy being green!'

    --
    III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIIIV IIVIIIIIIVIII...
  16. Ob.MP: by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 2

    Only on slashdot can one read a flamewar between intelligent people on what color the sun is.

    What color is the sun in YOUR world?

    Green.

    No! Yellow!

    Aaaaaaaaaagh!

    ;)