We can see the beauty of white, yellow, red, orange, and blue stars, but not green. Why is this?
In: Physics
There are actually many colors emitted by stars, including green. What you call white stars are actually many colors together. These colors come out of the different chemical elements in the star, usually mostly hydrogen, some helium, and the rest (~1%) made of several other elements. Hydrogen itself, though dominated by red light when excited, also emits violet, blue and green. These colors get scattered in our atmosphere and that’s why you see mostly yellow-orange from the sun and a blue sky.
But what about viewing it outside our atmosphere? Well, you still won’t see green stars, but that has two reasons — any star burning hot enough to produce most of its light as green will also be producing blue and red light, and human eyes will mix these and perceive it as white (or yellow if it’s equally red and green without blue).
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