Friday, January 11, 2002

Color of the Universe

As readers can probably guess by looking at the logo bar on this page, I like colors and spectra. So I loved reading about the color of the universe:

According to Karl Glazebrook & Ivan Baldry, astronomers at Johns Hopkins University, the universe is green. Sooner or later (like in a few billion years), the universe will be red. This is their chart, which shows the color of the universe (the left and right colors are for comparison):

comparison.png

Lest you think the search for the color of the universe was a quest for new and improved paint colors, researchers say, "The cosmic spectrum tells us about the history of star-formation in the Universe." The decimal RGB equivalents are 0.269, 0.388, 0.342.

Glazebrook and Baldry used John Walker's "Colour Rendering of Spectra" work to figure out the RGB equivalents.

I think the universe was a much prettier color about six billion years ago.
posted by lee on 01/11/02 at 06:21 PM

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