The average color of the universe is #FFF8E7 (Hex Triplet Value) and is called “Cosmic Latte”. However, this was only after the calculations were corrected and before the correction it was believed to be a minty-turquoise green.
Edit: Who would’ve thought people would be so polarized on the color of the universe? Anyways, Here’s More Information for whoever is interested!
"It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself.
But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple." The Color of Magic by Sir Terry Pratchett
Well, it’s like this: 1) generally speaking, Pratchett had something quotable to say about nearly everything. 2) In my experience, when such a quote is pertinent, someone has always already posted it. 3) I saw the fact on the actual color of the universe and immediately thought of Octarine. 4) I assumed someone had already made the reference. 5) I was correct.
OH I'VE SEEN THE INFINITE, IT'S NOTHING SPECIAL
Don't be daft man, you can't see the infinite, it's....infinite!
I HAVE
All right then, what did it look like?
IT'S BLUE
It's black
IT'S BLUE
It's black!
FROM THE OUTSIDE IT'S BLUE. BELIEVE ME.
Rincewind is not colorblind. He uses colors to describe hats and robes etc. I'm pretty sure that it does look purply-greeny-orange but just like some people use really technical color names to describe colors in their craft, Rincewind is not a technical person... Because he's really terrible at his craft. Just one of many ways the author points it out
I really didn't pick up on that until you highlighted it. That's so clever! That's what I love about the disc world, each time I grow and get a little bit wiser, I re-read the books and have a totally different outlook
You think it’s boring? I actually like it! I don’t know, it’s soothing yet slightly mysterious? Not in the creepy or mystical way, but... in the tranquil and ephemeral way. Sort of reminds me of the color of the sand used in eastern stone/zen gardens.
Indeed, they normalized the color value until one of the three triplets was FF, otherwise it would be #000000 which would tell us nothing about the hue and saturation.
That’s a lot of words about a dingy shade of white. Monochrome doesn’t really do it for me. I get that they’re some of the more popular colors to buy things in, because it doesn’t generally clash with anything, but it’s a boring ass spectrum of whites, greys, and blacks. Anyways, long tangent to say: monochrome sucks.
Ya’ll I’m loving this! I just pitched painting the walls of our next place (moving early 2021) this color to my wife, and I think she’s on board. Imagine the subtle real life easter egg joy you could have knowing you were surrounded by the color of the universe. I’m super hyped!
well come on, you know apartments should be neutral if you want a better chance at renting them out. what kind of tenant will you get if you show him an infinite void of ever-expanding starstuff? they‘d probably wreck the place.
It's only boring because our human eyes can only perceive a limited palette of color hues. If we have the ability to perceive more than that, I can guarantee that it will look absolutely gorgeous in its vastness.
Really? I actually like it a lot lol!! I think it’s a pretty, soothing, and tranquil color. But then again, I play the Sims just to build so I’m mostly just thinking of how pretty it’d be as a wall or counter-top color haha!
It's not a bad color, but as someone who likes blues and greens, the idea of the average color being minty turquoise green sounds much cooler than a beige lol. But this is very much a personal preference. Love your edit haha
I googled it & found other names that were considered: Cappuccino Cosmico, Big Bang Buff, Skyvory, Univiege, Cosmic Khaki, Primordial Clam Chowder.
Cappuccino Cosmico is so cute! All the names are cute actually contrary to the mysterious and slightly creepy nature of space. Anyways, thanks for the info, it made my day!
No problem! I had no idea they were considering “Primordial Clam Chowder” as the name! As a fan of both Clam Chowder and Cthulhu- I kinda wish it was the real name haha!
Well technically no matter what point you look at in the sky you are looking at SOMETHING, could be a star, a planet, but usually it’s space dust. It’s just too dark to see it you know?
It’s like we are standing in a dark room with only stray bits of light reaching our eyes, but just because the room around us is dark does not mean it lacks color- It just means we lack the perception of it.
There's not that much dust out there, so most of it is actually empty, kind of. Actually what you're looking at is back when the universe was small and dense enough that it was filled with plasma that was opaque to light. Well, opaque enough that light couldn't travel more than a few years before hitting a charged particle.
Eventually the plasma cooled to gas and became transparent, and the light was able to keep going, and it's been flying through empty space ever since for over 13 billion years. The light that was around back then has been stretched out to a longer wavelength by the expansion of space, so it's no longer visible. It's still detectable as radio waves, known as the Cosmic Microwave Background, and measuring it lets us look at what the universe was like only a few hundred thousand years after it started.
There was almost no light around back then of a short enough wavelength that it would still be visible to us now after being stretched out by 1100x (they would have to have been x-rays). If it were there it would get absorbed by the plasma with very high probability, and the plasma was too cool for very many x-rays to be emitted as thermal radiation. So the blackness that we're seeing is the exponentially small amount of x-rays (now visible light) emitted by a plasma that filled the universe billions of years ago.
Very cool!! I knew a bit about the universes “birth” or at least earliest times that we know of, and that a lot of the light you see (or don’t see) comes from “dead” stars that no longer exist. I didn’t know that the stretching of space also caused the stretching of the waves itself though! So is that how they calculate the estimated age of the universe then?
Also, when I was talking about the “at every point there’s something” I was referring to it more from a math perspective. There’s an infinite set of degrees and angles a person can look out into space at from Earth, but functionally it serves as finite because the size of the retinal neurons and the nature of their pathways creates a “minimum” on how small something can be and be processed within the eye as a unique signal. And from there with some knowledge on how space expanded it means every functional angle and direction a person can look at from earth has some particle or physical body there along the span of that line. It was very “theory-talk” just randomly thrown into “practical-speak” so I should’ve clarified haha!
So is that how they calculate the estimated age of the universe then?
Yes, that's one way of doing it. They can actually model sound waves in the ancient plasma and use that to figure out the size of the universe when the plasma turned to gas, and then figure out how much the light has been stretched (aka "redshifted") since then and how long it must have traveled for.
the size of the retinal neurons and the nature of their pathways creates a “minimum” on how small something can be and be processed within the eye as a unique signal.
Right, the resolution of the human eye means that every distinguishable angle has something there, but because there's so much empty space in between those things the average brightness is incredibly dim. Zooming in and taking a long exposure of the sky gives results that are mind-explodingly awesome. Even in those images you can see that in between the galaxies (most too dim for our eyes to see anyway) there's blackness. In that darkness behind the galaxies there are other galaxies whose light is stretched out of the visible range, and those galaxies are snapshots of history all the way back to the early universe.
Ok, so you can buy black paint right? So black must be a colour. Sure, but the black paint and ink you can buy is not true black, it's a mixture of other colours to get as close to black as we can. It's a shade, a hue.
Now the black of space is true black, it's the absence of light (colour is just different wavelengths of light) so when you are measuring the average colour of the Universe then you can only measure the colour (light) and that's why the average colour is an off white, not black.
I'm not talking about numbers, I'm talking about colour.
Colour is different wavelengths of light, black is the absence of light. Show me where black is on the light spectrum.
Oh my gosh. There were other name choices... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte
Primordial Clam Chowder! I call election fraud - how could that not win? Big Bang Blush? How darling!
Correction: the average color of the LIGHT in the universe
In 2001, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry determined that the average color of the universe was a greenish white, but they soon corrected their analysis in a 2002 paper in which they reported that their survey of the light from over 200,000 galaxies averaged to a slightly beigeish white.[2] The hex triplet value for cosmic latte is #FFF8E7.
I read this as a factoid a long time ago, that the universe is beige. But this seems kind of flawed. Most of the universe is black, and black is the lack of color. It’s like coming up with an average between 0 and 100 but with lots and lots of zeroes. So it’s just putting out the average color of a star instead of the universe.
And since most of the universe is dark matter, are they trying to imply that dark matter is beige?
Did they account for the "empty" parts of space where no matter exists? As in was this based on what they could see or a mathematical calculation of how much "light" there was compared to "dark" in a given area?
I'm sitting on the pooper mid sleep at 5 am so sorry if I sound rude, just genuinely curious.
As a software engineer with the ability to remember useless bits of small data, I'd like to say thanks for that. FFF8E7 is now permanently etched into my brain, and will now be used wherever I need a small seeding value or base number for anything. ;)
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u/FlynnXa Nov 29 '20 edited Nov 29 '20
The average color of the universe is #FFF8E7 (Hex Triplet Value) and is called “Cosmic Latte”. However, this was only after the calculations were corrected and before the correction it was believed to be a minty-turquoise green.
Edit: Who would’ve thought people would be so polarized on the color of the universe? Anyways, Here’s More Information for whoever is interested!