Instead of explaining to my daughter that Santa does not exist, I decided to tell her that The Sun is not actually yellow plus a bunch of unnecessary explanations about the emitting spectrums of light and ended up in a circle of questions from which there is no escape 2nd day. I know the complex scientific explanation, but can someone help me explain it to my *almost* 5-year-old daughter?
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Your eyes don’t scale every wavelength of light evenly. We evolved under the sun’s green-peak spectrum and equalize that out in our brains by amplifying reds and blues and muting yellows.
An alien might insist that *their* star is white and ours is visibly green, having evolved to balance the light of a different star.
That’s not entirely true. The peak emission of the sun is in green light, but it emits the entire spectrum of visible light. They all get mixed into a color that we interpret as white.
The sun is brightest in the green, but the difference between the amount of green, red, and blue light the sun emits is small enough that our eyes just interpret it as white.
As an analogy: If you have 200 red marbles, 200 green marbles, and 200 blue marbles in a bag, it would look like a bunch of multicolored marbles. If you had 190 red marbles, 220 green marbles, and 190 blue marbles in a bag, it would still look like a bunch of multicolored marbles.
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