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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."

20 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. 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 PD · · Score: 3, Informative

      Check the website: here

      --
      If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
    2. 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?

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    5. 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?

  2. 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

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

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

    --
    utter rubbish
  4. 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.

  5. 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 YU+Nicks+NE+Way · · Score: 2

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

  6. 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!"
  7. 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
  8. 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 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.

  9. 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 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)

  10. Egads by hrieke · · Score: 2

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

    --
    III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIIIV IIVIIIIIIVIII...
  11. 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!

    ;)