The Sun Is Green

The Sun is green, actually. We'll go into why the blackbody effect means the Sun emits more green visible light than any other color, and why evolution and color perception mean it's ok to see it as yellow, anyway.

Hosted by: Stefan Chin (he/him)
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[edl]

Fun fact: SciShow's boss is Green.

[antonsimmons]

I wondered, one day, "why have I NEVER seen a green star!?" So I did a bit of research on my own. I found out that the sun is green, that a lot of stars are green, actually. But it's a bit hard to explain, at least in short. This does a much better job than I do.

[azuradawn]

"Color is in our brains, not in the world." Welp. I was needing my daily existential crisis. Thank you.

[missheadbanger]

There's a rare phenomenon called a green flash that occurs during sunset and sun rise, it happebs when the atmosphere acts as both a prism and a lens
The longer wavelengths are absorbed by the atmosphere and the shorter wavelengths are scattered when the sun is mostly below the horizon.

[christianrivera]

As someone who is colorblind, I find this sort of thing very interesting.

[CapriUni]

So a solar farm for electricity is "Green Energy" in more than just the metaphorical sense. Neato!

[Xeonerable]

The way the visible spectrum interacts with objects and how our vision works will never not be fascinating. It's always crazy to think about how that is and why we see things as they are.

[DanielisAwesome]

Color being in our head I think is key here. Since we are able to differentiate more green shades than red or blue shades. I think that quirk combined with "too many other colors vying for our attention" leads to us ignoring the sun itself as green while seeing the effect of its green light in the most detail comparatively.

[Treviisolion]

One other thing that helps explain this, if the red cones are activates more than the green cones, then our brains will see red mostly. The red and green are also added together to produce the yellow color which is added to the red. If only red is activated we see red, but if a good amount of green and yellow light enters we see orange, until the green and red balance out when they cancel each other out and their additive color, yellow, becomes the primary color we see. Then as more green is added, it shifts to green drowning out most of the yellow signal.

Turns out that due to how our eyes process color, a blackbody spectrum can’t ever produce enough green light to drown out the reds oranges and yellows, and by the time that it does happen, the blues start to outweigh the greens, yellow, oranges, and reds and stars shift to being the color blue. Color perception is weird.

[gildedbear]

Fun fact, plants are green because they DON'T use green light for photosynthesis.

[KitagumaIgen]

The red and green cones has a response that overlap in wavelength - that is their sensitivities doesn't differ much at all. This makes our colour perception even more quirky.

[HeliJr]

Ha! I always thought the reason sunsets were orange was because light had to travel through more air...thanks for confirming that!

[LehkiBug]

You're telling me that The Green Sun is real? It always come back to Homestuck.

[vivichan]

I have been waiting for this moment my whole life.

[theAuroraBeam]

The sun wears sunglasses to protect us. Those are it's craziest flares.

[pidgeonshidgeon]

The nature of humanity is just that every so often someone accidentally invents Homestuck again

[ryanvess]

Having a phone with a messed up screen this statement couldn't be more true

[enderyu]

The sun's spectrum peaks around green, but only if you parametrize by wavelength. If you consider the intensity per unit of frequency the peak is somewhere down in the infrared

[thefitnessguy]

The sun wears shades because he's doing alright and getting good grades. His futures so bright he's gotta wear shades.

[rmt]

Thank you! Doing worldbuilding, and ended up picking a green sun. As I moved forward, I was confused with how our plant life matched the worldbuilding. Then figured out our sun must be green too. Green or purple leaves, plus the sun looks yellow or blue.
Was just talking about this last week!