When you look up at the night sky, it's easy to think that the universe is a never-ending sea of blackness. But if you measured the visible light from all of the luminous celestial bodies out there, what would the average color of the universe be?
"Black is not a color," Ivan Baldry, a professor at the Liverpool John Moores University Astrophysics Research Institute in the U.K., "Black is just the absence of detectable light."
The visible spectrum of a star or a galaxy is a measure of the brightness and wavelengths of light that the star or galaxy emits, which, in turn, can be used to determine the average color of the star or galaxy, Baldry said.
In 2002, Australia's 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey captured the visible spectra of more than 200,000 galaxies from across the observable universe. By combining the spectra of all these galaxies, Baldry and Glazebrook's team was able to create a visible light spectrum that accurately represented the entire universe, known as the cosmic spectrum.
The researchers used a color-matching computer program to convert the cosmic spectrum into a single color visible to humans, Baldry said.
The new color was eventually named "cosmic latte," based on the Italian word for milk, after a poll of the whole research team.
Yorum Gönder