
What Is the Average Color of the Universe? - ryan_j_naughton
http://priceonomics.com/what-is-the-average-color-of-the-universe/
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crimsonalucard
It's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a
boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and
therefore boring.

The interesting thing we should be asking is why does our biology cause us to
notice high wave lengths like red and find colors like beige to be really
plain and boring.

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bladedtoys
The vast majority of mammals have only black and white vision, quite likely
because all the common ancestors the survived the K-T event (the meteor impact
that killed the dinosaurs) were nocturnal.

Some groups such as fructivore primates have since re-evolved color vision to
recognize ripe fruit from unripe. Thus not only our ability to see "pretty"
colors but our probable instinctive liking of them as "pretty".

Also, color is more complicated than simple wave length. Human perception and
wavelength correspond fairly well most of the time. But we actually have three
different cells for detecting color (rather than say two: one for high
frequency one for low). The result is we can perceive a color like purple
where in fact there is no one wavelength but a blending of two wavelengths.
Pedantically by the way, red is a relatively low wave length.

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vraid
That most mammals are color blind is nothing more than a myth. A few select
are, like the marine mammals, but the vast majority are dichromats with
red/blue color receptors.

The last common ancestor was in fact a trichromat, having one red and two
different blue receptors. When mammals diverged further, monotremes lost one
of the blue receptors while other mammals lost the other.

What did reevolve in groups such as marsupials and apes was the green color
receptor, which was present in older ancestors, but had been lost in the first
mammals.

source:
[http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/364/15...](http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/364/1531/2957.full.pdf)

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semaphoreP
After knowing the answer is beige, it's not actually surprising after looking
at the spectrum. The spectrum they show is mostly flat so you don't expect one
color to dominate much over another (maybe a bit more red than blue..).

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stolio
_edit: oops. My apologies, sodium is responsible for the dark band at ~5,890 I
misread a graphic. Still looking into the spike..._

If like me you just had to know what was responsible for the huge spike in the
red (@ wavelength of about 6600 angstroms)....

Sodium.

Tangentially related (TIL) sodium also effects a star's end-of-life cycle:
[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/05/130529-how-s...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/05/130529-how-
stars-die-sodium-space-astronomy-science/)

~~~
semaphoreP
Looks like the H-alpha emisison line at 656 nm. It's a pretty strong line in
many astrophysical sources.

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nostrademons
When we were doing the first major visual redesign of Google Search back in
2010, we made the top ads color this (IIRC it's called "Cosmic Latte" [1])
because Jon Wiley thought it'd be cool. It was changed soon after launch once
the Ads folks started running A/B tests and making us more money, but for a
while, everyone was looking at the average color of the universe every time
they did a Google Search.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte)

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gargarplex
[http://www.thecolorofpaloalto.com/](http://www.thecolorofpaloalto.com/)

~~~
hellbanner
404

~~~
luisramalho
[https://web.archive.org/web/20141218085910/http://thecolorof...](https://web.archive.org/web/20141218085910/http://thecolorofpaloalto.com/)

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joshvm
Worth having a play with colorpy, some nice examples here of how you go from a
spectrum to a 'human' colour:

[http://markkness.net/colorpy/ColorPy.html](http://markkness.net/colorpy/ColorPy.html)

~~~
kelsolaar
Following your comment about 'ColorPy', I decided to write a quick IPython
notebook using our API (Which is borrowing some plotting aspect ideas to Mark
Kness package):

[http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/colour-science/colour-
ram...](http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/colour-science/colour-
ramblings/blob/master/the_cosmic_spectrum_and_the_color_of_the_universe.ipynb)

~~~
joshvm
Ah that's nice, I was looking for a package that would do spectrum to colour
in more or less a single line :)

~~~
kelsolaar
Let us know if any issues!

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jacobwcarlson
I know that they were trying to find the average wavelengths of visible light,
and I loathe pedantry, but shouldn't the answer be "black"?

~~~
stolio
In this context black is the absence of light, so it's disqualified right off
the bat.

With a clear night and a good telescope there are a lot of stars out there. So
I would say even the average color of the night sky looking out from earth
wouldn't be black.
[http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150101.html](http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150101.html)

~~~
p00b
I couldn't resist curiosity and had to analyze that apod image just to see...

    
    
      Average Color (rgb): 62, 45, 51
      Average Color (hex): #3E2D33 
      Average Color (visual): http://i.imgur.com/xDBeHqu.png
    
      Source: http://pastebin.com/vckL3AP6
      Credit: http://charlesmartinreid.com/wordpress/2012/08/python-image-averaging-and-color-averaging/ (with some cleanup)

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sarciszewski
I find it oddly appropriate that the average color of the universe is later
described as the most boring color possible.

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tszming
Priceonomics: We help companies crawl data from the web. Well, the article
itself is indeed interesting, but I am just curious why they post these kind
of content on their blog, is it related?

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dudurocha
They want to position themselves as data 'freaks'. They have an interesting
post when they released a book.

[http://priceonomics.com/everything-is-bullshit-a-book-by-
pri...](http://priceonomics.com/everything-is-bullshit-a-book-by-
priceonomics/)

