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What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
- semaphoreP 12y agoAfter knowing the answer is beige, it's not actually surprising after looking at the spectrum. The spectrum they show is mostly flat so you don't expect one color to dominate much over another (maybe a bit more red than blue..).
- gargarplex 12y agohttp://www.thecolorofpaloalto.com/ http://www.thecolorofpaloalto.com/
- hellbanner 12y ago404
- luisramalho 12y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20141218085910/http://thecolorofpaloalto.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20141218085910/http://thecolorof...
- jacobwcarlson 12y agoI know that they were trying to find the average wavelengths of visible light, and I loathe pedantry, but shouldn't the answer be "black"?
- stolio 12y agoIn this context black is the absence of light, so it's disqualified right off the bat. With a clear night and a good telescope there are a lot of stars out there. So I would say even the average color of the night sky looking out from earth wouldn't be black. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150101.html http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150101.html
- p00b 12y agoI couldn't resist curiosity and had to analyze that apod image just to see... Average Color (rgb): 62, 45, 51 Average Color (hex): #3E2D33 Average Color (visual): http://i.imgur.com/xDBeHqu.png Source: http://pastebin.com/vckL3AP6 Credit: http://charlesmartinreid.com/wordpress/2012/08/python-image-averaging-and-color-averaging/ (with some cleanup)
- sarciszewski 12y agoI find it oddly appropriate that the average color of the universe is later described as the most boring color possible.
- stolio 12y agoedit: oops. My apologies, sodium is responsible for the dark band at ~5,890 I misread a graphic. Still looking into the spike... If like me you just had to know what was responsible for the huge spike in the red (@ wavelength of about 6600 angstroms).... Sodium. Tangentially related (TIL) sodium also effects a star's end-of-life cycle: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/05/130529-how-stars-die-sodium-space-astronomy-science/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/05/130529-how-s...
- gus_massa 12y agoIn the spectrum graph (near the bottom) there are ¿two? light band at 4500-4600A but there is no spike in the graphic. All the other light bands have spikes and all the dark bands have valleys. Do you know what happened there?
- semaphoreP 12y agoLooks like the H-alpha emisison line at 656 nm. It's a pretty strong line in many astrophysical sources.
- crimsonalucard 12y agoIt's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and therefore boring. The interesting thing we should be asking is why does our biology cause us to notice high wave lengths like red and find colors like beige to be really plain and boring.
- hellbanner 12y agoSomeone told me red is shorter so we see it faster -- is there any biological evidence for this?
- ertdfgcb 12y agoI don't think so, red has a smaller wavelength than the other colors we see, but I don't think that could translate into us seeing it faster (whatever that even means). It's pretty rare to see red in nature that isn't blood or fire, and when you do it's often on dangerous things (like those frogs in the amazon). Maybe red is so striking to us because red things in nature are things we need to pay attention to?
- semaphoreP 12y agoRed actually has a larger wavelength. Red is at ~600 nm, while green and blue are at ~500nm and ~400nm respectively. Red has a lower frequency though.
- soroushjp 12y agoNot sure about the biology, but there is some evidence from physics for this. The speed of light is constant in a vacuum, but different for different wavelengths in a medium. This is why shining white light through a glass prism causes it to disperse into many colors -- they each travel through the medium at slightly different speeds. Interestingly, the refractive index (how much the light slows down in a medium) is higher for larger wavelengths like red in the color spectrum. So technically, red light travels slower than blue or green light in a medium (eg. air, water etc.). Of course I would delays in this would be absolutely tiny compared to delays due to neural processing .... but hey who knows, maybe we can tell the difference!
- tszming 12y agoPriceonomics: We help companies crawl data from the web. Well, the article itself is indeed interesting, but I am just curious why they post these kind of content on their blog, is it related?
- dudurocha 12y agoThey want to position themselves as data 'freaks'. They have an interesting post when they released a book. http://priceonomics.com/everything-is-bullshit-a-book-by-priceonomics/ http://priceonomics.com/everything-is-bullshit-a-book-by-pri...
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- nostrademons 12y agoWhen we were doing the first major visual redesign of Google Search back in 2010, we made the top ads color this (IIRC it's called "Cosmic Latte" [1]) because Jon Wiley thought it'd be cool. It was changed soon after launch once the Ads folks started running A/B tests and making us more money, but for a while, everyone was looking at the average color of the universe every time they did a Google Search. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte
- joshvm 12y agoWorth having a play with colorpy, some nice examples here of how you go from a spectrum to a 'human' colour: http://markkness.net/colorpy/ColorPy.html http://markkness.net/colorpy/ColorPy.html
- kelsolaar 12y agoFollowing your comment about 'ColorPy', I decided to write a quick IPython notebook using our API (Which is borrowing some plotting aspect ideas to Mark Kness package): http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/colour-science/colour-ramblings/blob/master/the_cosmic_spectrum_and_the_color_of_the_universe.ipynb http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/colour-science/colour-ram...