Check out myth number 4 from this article: http://www.cracked.com/article_19649_6-myths-everyone-believes-about-space-thanks-to-movies.html I was stunned when I read this article and then I did some research. It's true. The sun's real color is white but appears yellow from the Earth's atmosphere. It doesn't help that NASA publishes photoshopped pictures of the sun either. It kind of seems like a conspiracy to me. I've been searching for the past couple of hours looking for an unfiltered image of the sun and haven't found anything besides what was shown in the article. But I want more proof. Was I the only one who thought the sun was yellow?
Our sun is categorized as a yellow dwarf star. Perhaps that's why you were thinking yellow? That and all the crayon drawings of smiling yellow suns!
I thought it was green actually! My brother once measured the wavelengths coming from the sun and he measured that it was green. I guess he could have been wrong?
Well green is certainly coming from the sun as almost all other wavelengths of visible light as well as non-visible electromagnetic waves. There are parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that are missing, but they are mere slivers in the spectrum of light that our sun gives off. If you were able to take a prism that could perfectly diffract the suns rays with great resolution and spread it out probably over the length of an entire city block or so, you would actually see these slivers of color that are missing. We call it the sun's absorption spectra. All stars have different absorption spectra which are kind of like bar codes that tell us what types of elements the star is fusing inside. I suspect that the color classifications we give to stars is purely based on the relative colors that they appear to us from inside our own atmosphere. Red giants may appear to us redder than the sun because they don't produce as much high energy photons in the blue to ultraviolet range as do younger suns. I don't know for sure, but it's interesting to look into! =3 Our atmosphere is able to block the small amount that is coming it to make it look red, but in space it would still look white.
This is how I always knew we had a yellow sun. It gave Superman his powers. I always wondered if I went to Krypton under his "red" sun would I get super powers? :lol:
Yes, as I was doing my research I read that the classifications do come from our perception of them. Perception can be a really tricky thing. I wish NASA would publish more unfiltered satellite photos. For the longest time, I thought this was what the sun really looked like in space: But I guess that's the beauty of photoshop. Just take a look at these: I actually think the sun would look really impressive up close but our technology isn't advanced enough to capture its essence.
I'm with Peregrin: our technology's up to it, but our eyes have a little trouble. Think of the filters as sunglasses: darken the whole image, and the eye can manage to see details that would get lost in the glare otherwise.
I bet that the reason why we think the sun is yellow is because as children, when we wanted to draw the sun, we drew on white paper. So when trying to represent the sun, we chose the next brightest, lightest color, yellow.
