Scientists have decided that the color of the universe is somewhere between “pale turquoise and medium aquamarine.” No, really.
Ivan Baldry and Karl Glazebrook at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found the cosmic colour by combining light from over 200,000 galaxies within two billion light years of Earth. They worked with data from the Australian 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in New South Wales, Australia.
Combining the light gave a spectrum with a peak in the blue part of the optical spectrum – due to the large number of young stars burning hydrogen – and another in the red part of the spectrum -due to the glow of older red giants burning heavier elements.
[…] For any computer buffs wishing to put the colour on their desktops, the red-green-blue values you will need are 0.269, 0.388 and 0.342.
The point of this (aside from giving interior decorators fits) is that by tracking color changes over time, or in given areas, certain cosmological models can be supported or discredited.
Glazebrook and Baldry have already used their result to rule out some models of star formation. In 1994, astronomers working with images of the early Universe from the Hubble Space Telescope claimed that star formation in the Universe was slow to start with, peaked around six billion years ago, and has tailed off towards the present day.
But Glazebrook says such a scenario would produce a redder colour than is seen, because more old red stars from the early Universe would still be around. “We take account of star death in our model as well,” he says.
For those who don’t care for the tone, just hang around. As the Universe continues to age, it will become steadily more red. It will just take several billion years …
(Via Words Mean Things)