Is it yellow because from Earth it usually looks yellow to us? Or is it white because the sun gives off all wavelengths of light (white light)? Or is it some other color?
In: Planetary Science
This is a tricky question, because ‘color’ is basically defined by how something differs from the light given out by the sun.
Your sense of color has evolved to tell you about the properties of surfaces around you. Specifically, which parts of the sun’s light sink into them and which bounce off.
So a strawberry looks red because it’s absorbed the green looking parts of the sunlight, and vice versa for the green leaves around it.
Each color you can see represents a different direction in which sunlight can be skewed.
So what color is the sun itself? Arguably it doesn’t have a color, in the same way that still air has no sound.
The sun is our perceptual zero point in color space, and every ‘white’ artificial source of light you’ve ever seen has simply been trying to spoof it.
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