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
Stars are “black body” radiators. They glow because they’re hot, and they emit photons at a broad spectrum of energies (a spread of colors). Because of this broad spectrum, they’re all more or less “white”: the light is a blend of all the colors
The hotter the star’s surface, the more energetic photons they emit. More energetic photons are higher frequency, or “more blue”. But it’s never a pure blue: it won’t make a red object look black.
Instead, there are different colors of “white light”, and we refer to them by “color temperature”, which is literally the temperature (in Kelvin) of the black body source that emits that spectrum. The sun is around 5700K. An indoor lightbulb is around 2700K, so it looks more yellow-orange than daylight.
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