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Space Science

Universe Pale Turquoise, On Average 49

Posted by timothy from the slashdot's-cosmic-color-scheme dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "AP is reporting that the average color of the universe is a "sprightly" turquoise-green. If only they'd known before the new iMacs came out! Link is to Salon.com."
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Universe Pale Turquoise, On Average More

Universe Pale Turquoise, On Average

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  • Little known fact (Score:3, Informative)

    by PD ( 9577 ) <slashdotlinux@pdrap.org> on Thursday January 10, 2002 @06:45PM (#2820021) Homepage Journal
    Our sun is actually pale green in color. So that's yet another thing that makes us average.
  • The article points out that the RGB triple is (0.269, 0.388, 0.342). Assuming this is out of a scale from 0->1, and scaling to 0->255, we get values (69, 99, 87) (roughly), or 0x456357. This gives a color swatch that looks like this. The background of this box is the color they claim... seems kinda dark compared to their description.

  • It's nice to know (Score:4, Funny)

    by ninewands ( 105734 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @07:22PM (#2820272)
    that Mother Nature's decorating tastes are stuck in the 1950's.
  • One wonders if the indians have always understood this. Some northern Arizona/NM tribes have used the various shades of turquoise as money and adornment, as well as in religious and artistic creations for a long time. In fact, they consider themselves to be turquoise (not red), according to an article [yahoo.com] I found.

    • Re:Indians knew this, I bet (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 10, 2002 @08:07PM (#2820525)
      Or perhaps it could be because turquoise is abundant in the south west and stands out against the brown and red rock of the desert. Humans love rare, shiny things and turquoise was the SW tribes' version of gold.

  • My T-shirt (Score:3, Funny)

    by dankjones ( 192476 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @08:45PM (#2820740) Homepage
    I have a T-shirt that is a lovely shade of 420 MeV and, I think, a rather tasefull spin correlation coefficient that highlights my dandieness.

  • If only they'd known before the new iMacs came out!

    Implication being that God "thought different"? Or is that "thunk different" in Apple advertising grammar, since it's "think different" instead of "think differently"?

  • The Color of the Universe (Score:3, Informative)

    by Trinn ( 523103 ) <livinglatexkali@gmail.com> on Thursday January 10, 2002 @11:51PM (#2821443)
    Well, given that the colors are indeed given as normed values, essentially all they give us is a hue and a saturation, no luminosity. Assuming a full luminosity (highest given # is is equal to FF), it easily computes to:
    RED:0xB1
    GREEN:0xFF
    BLUE:0xE1
    I used the WinXP Powertoys calculator...and actually, it gives decimals...err....well, it puts a . into hex numbers and gives you what probably amounts to 1/16, 1/256, etc. places after it....just in case anyone's interested.
    --me(who else?)

  • Isn't it obvious, really? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PhilHibbs ( 4537 ) <snarks@gmail.com> on Friday January 11, 2002 @05:53AM (#2822317) Journal
    They're talking about the visible spectrum, which is a slice out of a much broader range of frequencies. If you take an arbitrary slice out of an evenly distributed set of data, you would expect the average to be right in the middle, which is roughly where turquoise lies, so surely this is statistical nonsense.
  • So I understand Red and Blue shifting, Does this mean I now have to understand green shifting as well.

    (Greeen shifting when you and an object are not moveing closer or away from one another)

  • In related news (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The IIDA, International Interior Decorators Association, has started to lobby NASA and Congress for funds to purchase paint, rollers and brushes with. They are claiming that this horrid turquoise color is just not the image that we as an up coming species want to present to the Universe. They plan on using more lively, vibrant colors in the redecorated galaxy.
  • How did this tell us anything we didn't already know? Aside from the "visible" spectrum being a small and arbitrary slice of the pie (woo, it's what humans can see, it must be important) we already knew that the majority of stars are massive bright blue ones, because the universe isn't out of large clouds of hydrogen for massive stars to form yet. Therefore it's obvious that the average of all visible light would be greenish.

    This discovery is like proclaiming the "average" of all the atoms currently existing is carbon or oxygen, its moronic.

    • This discovery is like proclaiming the "average" of all the atoms currently existing is carbon or oxygen, its moronic

      Yes, that would be moronic, since the most common atom is hydrogen. Tee hee hee.

    • we already knew that the majority of stars are massive bright blue ones, because the universe isn't out of large clouds of hydrogen for massive stars to form yet.

      Actually, the vast majority of stars are little and, with very low luminosity, all of them invisible to the naked eye. The 'mass function' (the relative percentage of stars of different mass) gives something like 100 little red stars for every blue monster. There are luminous red stars, but they are just blue monsters getting old.

      As a side note, almost all the stars that you can see in the night are luminosity monsters, apart from a few ones ( Alpha centauri). Sirius is one of the weakest, because it's equivalent to "only" 8 suns. There are stars as luminous as 50,000 suns ( Deneb, Canopus)
    • woo, it's what humans can see, it must be important
      Visible light is important to us. Tell me, who is it not important to?
  • Kermit the Frog was right, 'It's not easy being green!'

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