Do you ever wonder what is the colour of our sun? However yellow the dwarf star might appear, scientists say the real colour of sun is white.
Yes, the sun is not yellow in colour. As per former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, the real colour of the sun is white. This space fact might leave your mind boggled for a few minutes.
So, why does the sun appear yellow to us? A strange play of physics of light is responsible for this.
The light from our sun is basically all the colours mixed together, which appear to our eyes as white. But this is only easy to see in the pictures taken from outer space.
It is our atmosphere because of which the sun appears yellow. But once you are above the earth’s atmosphere, the Sun appears white, all thanks to the human eyes.
Let us know why our eyes are unable to perceive a singular colour of the sun.
This is because of the amount of sunlight that saturates the photoreceptor cells in our eyes; it causes all the colours to be mushed together. So, when every colour of light is combined, you end up with white. This is why the sun appears yellow on earth but white in space.
What is the real colour of sun?
NASA explains this with the help of basic science. We all know that the shorter wavelength blue light is scattered more efficiently than longer wavelength red light.
When we lose some of the blue tints of the sun as sunlight passes through the earth’s atmosphere, the light that reaches our eyes does not immediately saturate the cone receptors.
“This allows the brain to perceive colour from the image with a little less blue-yellow. Though it does not affect what our eyes see, all x-ray and gamma-ray radiation are filtered out before it comes close to the ground. Most UV is absorbed by stratospheric ozone (above 10km) and most IR is absorbed by water vapour and other molecules with non-zero dipole moments,” NASA explained.
To elaborate it further, NASA added that when the sunlight passes through a lot of atmospheres, blue light is scattered and a much greater percentage of the longest wavelength (red) light makes it to our eyes.
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