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Universe Beige, not Turquoise
ChazeFroy writes: "The universe is actually beige, not turquoise. Researchers at John Hopkins University initially reported it was turquoise, but the software they used contained a flaw that implemented a non-standard white index to arrive at the mint chocolate chip green color." The other color was much nicer than this beige.
That's why it's the natural color for all computer cases!
... now I have to redecorate my apartment!
- Have a picture
...when she said "Beige, I think I'll paint the ceiling beige..."
The GIMP tells me that the colour of the universe is #FEF9E5 in hex. Now that's got to mean something :-p
42........ Nope doesn't work. Beige... hmmm
Even if it isn't as tasty...
though I've always been more of a butter pecan fan, so the beige is fine with me.
From a colour perspective, it makes much more sense than a shade of green. Every kid who's ever played with play-doh knows that if you mix a bit of this with a pinch of that to create new colours (which is essentially what you get from stars.. blue, red, green, yellow, etc), you eventually end up with that nasty brown lump of play-doh that ends up getting left under the couch for the dog to play with.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
Before you may cross the bridge you must answer these questions three.
Q: Where are you from?
A: Johns Hopkins University.
Q: What is your professtion?
A: We are astronomers.
Q: What color is the Universe?
A:It's green... no, it's beige AAAAAAAaaaaaaaaiiiiiiieeeeeeeeee!
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Looks like it's an Intel universe after all...
considering that we still only see a fraction of what there is to see. What will happen when the Hubble sees it better in the future?
I think its much easier to declare black with small bright spots. At least the public can understand that.
I am still curious as to what significance this really has overall. It appears from the article that it was just for the fun of it, so how does it become news? Originality?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Use Plank's constant to find out what the peak wavelength at 3 degrees Kelvin (the cosmic bg temp) is. This is the color of the Universe, as it is the color you "see" in all directions (if your eyes could see this wavelength, that is).
dinner: it's what's for beer
Johns Hopkins Researchers Say Universe Much Blander Than Before
It's nice to see a respected source as space.com using headlines that sound more like The Onion.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I'm glad to see those students are doing something productive with their time.
~.Evanrude
The Universe also has Track lighting and a great disco beat.
...For a minute there I was worried! The universe was clashing with the sofa.
the question is not what color the universe is, but how to change it.
But most of the energy in the universe is NOT from the CMB. Remember the Stefan-Boltzmann law: energy per unit area goes like sigma T^4. 3 K is barely a blimp. The billions of stars in each of the billions of galaxies are at 1500 K or more (the sun is 5800 K, blue stars are hotter still). That T^4 comes in like a demon and means that most of the energy we perceive does NOT come from the CMB.
I like how the researcher says that he is open for suggestions on what to name the color as long as it isn't beige...
/. and the rest of the media shout, "The Universe is Beige!"
and then
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
I'm glad they cleared that up. For a while, there, I was really worried.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
''But this is science. We're not like politicians. If we make mistakes, we admit them. That's how science works.''
:-))
This is brillant (sorry beige...
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
Funny how you didn't click all the links.
From Glazebrook's page:
"We admit the color of the Universe was something of a gimmick, to try and make our story on spectra more accessible. Nevertheless it is an actual calculable thing so we believe it is important to get it right."
And:
"Of course, our real motive for calculating the cosmic spectrum was really a lot more than producing these pretty color pictures. The color is interesting but in fact the cosmic spectrum is rich in detail and tells us a lot more about the history of star formation in the Universe. You may have noticed above that the cosmic spectrum contains dark lines and bright bands, these correspond to the characteristic emission and absorption of different elements."
So this actually reveals something about the makeup and history of the universe. Viola, science!
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
However, this isn't what you see from earth at all. Originally I thought they had simulated what would happen if you could "funnel" all the starlight on a dark night visible from Earth (or even outside our atmosphere) and created one beam from it. They've sort of done this, but in their model they've stopped the expansion of the universe and "corrected" the light to make it appear as if the universe is static and all those galaxies are not actually moving away from us.
So, I'm not sure what to make of this color - it's not one you'd ever actually see: it's not "real" in the sense you could measure it somewhere.
Please Rate my comment (and help support Fre
Well, I guess that would be the distinction between the color of the universe and the color of space. The color of space is whatever wavelength is associated with 3 K. I'm thinking about things from the perspective of a viewer inside the universe, looking at an empty patch, rather than a viewer outside the universe, looking at the whole thing - which is nonsense, really, since there is no "outside the universe."
dinner: it's what's for beer
Of course now I've gone and offended astronomers (no intent to. I just find it odd how many of these "discoveries" are treated as if they change life as we know it: As if realizing something alters the past).
It makes sense - Dell's conspiracy grows deeper by the minute! Dude, you're getting a universe.
Go Kart Parts - Got to love driving with the ground an in
God isn't gay and has no gay friends, because they would have mocked him for his horrible taste. :P
I'll stick with the false-color images of the universe EM background as a nice blend of purple and black
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Further than that. It's microwave, so it's already into the radio.
Talk to a graphic artist some time (or, depending on what quality of monitor drivers you're using, explore your own monitor settings.) Setting the white point properly -- i.e., deciding what temperature "white" on your monitor corresponds to -- is vitally important for sophisticated image creation and processing. A difference of a few degrees Kelvin can change the whole color balance of your image. If you have these controls on your machine (on a Mac you definitely will, on a PC you probably won't unless you've installed Photoshop or something equivalent, and I don't know about Linux) play around with them and you'll see what I mean.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
before we find out that the color is actually khaki, and there's some alternate universe next door that's colored IBM/corporate blue, and that our neighborhood of universes is actually some wageslave in a cubicle trying to figure out the question to 42.
Sigh. I miss Adams.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
It's not a troll that challenges them. "It's the old man from Scene 24!"
(Not the best reference site, but the best one is currently down.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
3 K blackbody radiation, I'm guessing, falls into the ELF category. Peak wavelength is most likely in the order of kilometers. But it's STILL a wavelength, damnit!
dinner: it's what's for beer
In the parent article, the author asks for suggestions for a name to this color, and explicitly asks for people not to suggest "beige." (Perhaps he/she views it as the easy way out.)
Any other suggestions?
Exactly. According to this CNN article, the astronomers who made the statement didn't regard it as a newsworthy discovery and are surprised by the extent of the media coverage:
The astronomer said that expressing the color for popular viewing was not even part of the original scientific experiment. They did it "as a lark."
"We were doing this as an amusing footnote to our paper," said Glazebrook. "Then there was a huge media thing. We were completely overwhelmed. We didn't expect it to get so big."
So now we find that the universe is simply off-color?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Hi this is Glazebrook here (honest!)
I am a regular slashdot reader for my sins. Finally an incentive to actually sign up.
I am amused to see the story got on the front pages this time, sorry that I had to be wrong to achieve this feat!
hope you all read the web page and about the science of starlight (and color!)
http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~kgb/cosspec/
and it's much more complicated than 'averaging 3 numbers'. The color is a volume-averaged - deredshifted (otherwise it would not be very meaningful) sum of all starlight. Those of you with www skills will be able to track down the origin of the erroneous software I will not deprecate it here.
Karl
p.s. the color suggestions are poring in, my favorite so far is 'cosmic latte'
First off, this type of thing is not what the "real science" is about. It's just the PR stuff that seems to grab the front page. True, the color of the universe isn't going affect anyone (really), but you must admit that it's a pretty cool idea.
Secondly, there are very few things (especially in the academic fields) that are "useful" to the general public. The same argument could be made about art, music, or basically anything else other than food production, medicine, etc. . .
To quote Henri Poincare: "[The scientist does] not study science because it is useful to do so... [but rather] studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living..."
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
But that's just it - my understanding of what they said was that they removed the redshift from the spectra. In other words, had they just gone up in space and pointed a spectrometer all over the place in Earth orbit (forgive my simplistic account) they would have come up with a much redder hue for the universe, since most of the incoming spectra would be significantly red-shifted, and that would have produced a very red average.
Please Rate my comment (and help support Fre
As long as the answer is still 42, I'm OK. I just have to go out and buy a new matching towel. Anyone want to buy a turquoise towel set?
Secondly, there are very few things (especially in the academic fields) that are "useful" to the general public. The same argument could be made about art, music, or basically anything else other than food production, medicine, etc. . .
Well, medicine does have an impact upon our lives, so when I see a report that they've found a protein that makes rats live 60% longer, that is much closer to relevance to me than if they found that the universe is actually X years old, versus the previously believed Y (versus the previously believed Z...repeat perpetually: As others have said: Someone will use a better CCD and find that the universe is actually a light red, etc).
However, my point is that every new astronomy "breakthrough" is reported in all major media, while breakthroughs in other sciences are ignored : I mean, really, how many people are employed worldwide gawking at stars an unbelievable distance away, while at the same time we're not even close to getting a person on the nearest planet, barely even accomplishing keeping them in a tin can in near-orbit? And every couple of weeks there's the standard "Astronomers have found a twin-star X light years away that spins faster than they've ever found one spin before!". Now, when a giant asteroid is headed towards Earth, I care, but when they find that prior knowledge was ignorant (which is a constant theme for "Breakthroughs"), I don't.
You know, maybe it's because they complained about "beige" and then called it something horrid like "I11 E Gamma."
OK, how about
- Putty
- Toast
- Sand
- Grits with Redeye Gravy
- Natalie Portman's Naked Flesh in March
The really scary thing is that it does indeed look like the precise color of my company-issued IBM PIII/800 workstation.I can see the fnords!
(reality distortion field takes effect)
Researcher 1: Hey, I think the universe is that greenish color.
Jobs: It's called Bondi, you twit!
Researcher 2: Nah, I think it's more bluish.
Jobs: (Jumping up and down furiously) AQUA! AQUA! AQUA!
Researcher 1: Let's just call it turquoise.
(after Jobs returns to Cupertino to plot his domination of the universe's color...)
Researcher 2: What the hell were we thinking? The universe is beige, not turquoise! Duh! We'd better change our report. What? 'It looks like you're trying to change the color of the universe?' Stupid paper clip.
So does this mean that various racist organizations are gonna be complaining about living in a "mud" universe?
Color coordination is a bitch with beige. What should I wear to the next Big Bang?
Beige is such a bland color. How is our universe ever gonna attract another universe if it's such a bland color. Now, universe X14, that's a universe with a sense of color.
Did they account for the color shift caused by the atmosphere? Remember, these are the same type of guys who used metric instead of English measurements on Mars.
Why aren't there any other color universes? This is a beige conspiracy against universes of color.
I'll stop now.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Then this must mean... Martha Stewart is God!
No, again: microwaves. These guys are millimeters to centimeters wavelength. (To convert, remember Wien's law: 0.29cm-K/T = peak wavelength) T = 2.78 K, so peak wavelength ~ .1cm = 1 mm.
How about "SunTan" ©? Har Har, get it - Sun (as in stars)...Tan (as in Beige)...
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The color swatch at space.com is WRONG! The correct hex code taken from the academic page is #fff8e7 (which is gamma corrected assuming a display gamma of 2.2 which is only an average for various available monitors).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Umm, on my color calibrated Apple Studio Display, its quite easy to see, and its clearly beige -- actually more in the Crayola "Flesh Tone(TM)" range.
It's even worse. While they did correct for the red-shift, they did not apparently correct for the "lateness" of the light. Since we are seeing galaxies a few billion LY away in the colors they had a few billion years ago, we are not really averging their current colors. Earlier stars form from the basic gasses of the big bang were hotter and bluer. Later stars have heavier atoms, and are not quite as hot, and so they shine at a lower temperature, hence more red. So if we could correct for the time it takes for light to travel, and see the current light right now it might be more red (certainly more if you do include red-shift in this), or less red (if red-shift made it redder than age).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Thank goodness for this type of research.
ceci n'est pas une signature
Is there any scientific use for knowing the color of the universe? I can't imagine one. Who paid for this? (probably my grossly overtaxed self in some indirect way).
11*43+456^2
This anonymous poster is entirely correct, and the parent is incorrect. I'd mod him up myself, if I had any moderator points left.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
According to the article, they took the colors from 200000 galaxies and averaged them to find beige. However, this does not take into account all of the empty space in between, which is an integral part of defining the universe. Perhaps they should go back to the simulation again, and add in an amount of black proportional to the volume of space in the universe not taken up by celestial bodies. Then we would know whether or not the human eye can really even see the universe, or if will just appear as nothing from a sufficiently large distance.
Uhhh, we made another mistake. After having reviewed our software yet another time, and fixing the error, we have determined that the universe is indeed invisible. Sorry to all of you attempting to paint your houses the color of the universe...
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Here's an example of where averages mislead. The interesting thing about color is not the average, but the contrast between colors. Trust me; I'm renovating my house right now. Or trust anybody who's stared too much at the sun.
..I just had my room repainted to mach the color of universe and now they tell me that I did all of that for nothing..
Their work with colors and spectrums and such can be used to tell what kind of elements there were and gain a better understanding of the early times of our universe.
Then they were like..."HEY! Let's average these all together just for fun." Then it got all popular cause the media jumped on it.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.