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Have you ever asked yourself what the color of the sun really is? Do you think it’s yellow or orange, like we always see during sunrise and sunset? The answer is that the sun is actually white, and not blue, yellow, or orange. Its color is not the same as the images you might see of it, as a burning ball of fire. This has been confirmed by scientists and astronauts who have traveled to space and witnessed it firsthand, but let’s explore why and how that is.
True Color Up in Space
When astronauts look up at the sun when they go to space or from the International Space Station, the sun looks pure white. This is simply because the sunlight it is emitting actually combines all spectrums of visible light evenly.
In other words, it emits all the colors in a rainbow, and peaks at a near-green wavelength, but because of how our eyes and brain work, we perceive its color as white. However, when you look at the sun from the Earth, it will look like different colors depending on where you are and what time of day it is.
Read more: NASA
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Why Our Sky Makes It Look Yellow
Before we see the sunlight, it will travel through our atmosphere first, scattering the different wavelengths of visible light, including the blue and green. By the time we see it, only the colors yellow, orange, and red are intact, and we call this process Rayleigh scattering.
It refers to the dispersion of light particles and is the phenomenon responsible for why our sky is blue. This scattering is caused by the tiny air and dust molecules in our atmosphere, where those light particles bounce off until they get distributed in the sky.
Color Changes at Sunrise & Sunset
During sunrise and sunset, the light particles travel through our atmosphere longer, causing a greater dispersion of the shorter wavelengths of colors like blue, green, and violet. So, during this time, the sun can appear bright red, orange, or yellow.
These colors we see during the sunrise and sunset are longer wavelengths of color that are not affected as much by the Rayleigh scattering, which disperses the color blue in the sky. So the warm, beautiful-looking sun we see during those times is still actually color white in outer space.
Read more: ThoughtCo.com
Understanding Sunlight & Perception
Sunlight is a mix of every visible color, namely violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red (VIBGYOR), which forms the color white, as it was confirmed by physics and space photography. Though our sun is still classified as a yellow dwarf, that yellow we see is just our atmosphere playing tricks, but actually protecting us from its intense heat, so do not get mad at it for changing the sun’s color.
Author's Final Thoughts
The sun emits a full rainbow of light, making its true color white, which we can only see from space because our atmosphere is the one responsible for changing its color. So, while that yellow image of a burning ball of fire known as the sun is popular, it is scientifically wrong. We hope you learn something new today from this article, and here is the next one if you’d like to continue reading!
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