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Sunglasses idea: The Sun is like a D&D troll, with active infravision. (Or like Marvel's Cyclops.) It wears the glasses to avoid burning us with its glare...
"Shining a flashlight on a radio antenna doesn't affect reception" **maniacal laughter with pinky finger in corner of mouth** **pulls out "laser" and saws it off at the base**
judging by the comments should have put a warning on this video to tell people not to look at the sun, since so many of the viewers/commenters are claiming to stare at the sun and see that it's green
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.
Here’s the explanation. Green stars emit light of all colors at almost the same quantities and we perceive them as white, because of how human eyes work. Going into detail, we see no green stars because of 2 factors. The first factor is how human eyes work. Human eyes have red, green, and blue rods, each of which detect a specific range of colors. These ranges overlap and makes 2 kinds of rods send signals to the brain, which in turn interprets as color. When the eyes receive an approximately equal amount of all colors of the visible light, the brain interprets this as the object being white, even though on average the object has a different color, say green. The second factor is black body radiation. Star color and luminosity are directly proportional to the star’s temperature and therefore luminosity, however light emitted by stars isn’t monochrome. While green stars emit more green light, they still emit approximately the same amount of light of other colors.
basically it's because we see green stars as white, right? it's like when you see a rainbow that isn't perfect (meaning it overlaps itself too much), it goes red-orange-yellow-white-cyan-blue-violet, the yellow-white-cyan part being where there's high levels of green light. it's just that there's too much light of the other colors present for us to see only the green. ...that made more sense in my head, haha
Cool Worlds has a great video ("The Star that Can't Exist") on why green-looking stars are impossible (any size/temperature in the right range for green light to be predominant also produces enough red and blue light to look white to our eyes). In fact, it has been suggested that a star that actually looked green could be a good way to signal that there is an advanced intelligent civilization as it could only be produced artificially.
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.
I was hoping someone would mention this. I think it's more common to see them at sunset, near the ocean, and higher up (like a cliff side or hill). For those who don't know, you'll only spot this effect just as the last/first spot of light is passing over the horizon. I saw one once. Mine looked like a pilot light going out on an appliance.
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.
And the way our brain takes light of a variety of colors and interprets it as a color that may not be present much at all. Something "yellow" might be reflecting mostly green and red light. Or it might actually be reflecting yellow light.
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.
i mean. does it? the overlap is crucial for our vision to work at all, but ill assume you meant that medium and long cone response curves overlap quite a lot. im unconvinced this matters much, though, because from a mathematical standpoint all thats required is for each wavelength to map to a unique linear combination of responses (in other words, these responses could be identical save for a 0.1nm offset and the math would be the same). factor in some headroom because biology is messy and it seems our bodies have a perfectly fine system for discerning wavelengths
@@jotch_7627 Color vision is essentially the proportionate response of the three, broadband color receptors in our eyes. Two of those do have a lot of overlap. Color is based on the ratio of how the three are stimulated and why we have 3 primary colors in our color wheel. But you can have 2 completely different spectra that elicit identical spectral response in the photoreceptors so they appear as identical colors. A good, fundamental text in color science is Hunter's "The Measurement of Appearance" and its a deep dive into color science. I spent 17 years doing color analysis and had to write my own code to take measured visible light spectra and convert them to color conformity for ASTM, ANSIm CEN and ISO color standards.
@@jotch_7627 Except Our eyes only capture raw sensory data and it's our brain which does the processing. A good portion of our brain is devoted to visual processing aka perception: Occipital (mainly) and Parietal (somewhat) regions of our brain. We don't correctly discern wavelengths (colors): for instance, color constancy. We see colors subjectively and the perceived color is constant under different light conditions. For instance a white ball. We will perceive it as a white ball under many lighting scenarios. This creates all sorts of issues especially if you're an artist trying to paint a still life or a plein air landscape. Artists understand that colors are very relative (including other dimensions such as value and chroma) and depend on context: what it is next to. Checker shadow illusion is mindblowing and while it uses grayscale, it can be done using colors.
@@jotch_7627 yeah, the overlap is actually critical in actually even having *any* sort of color perception. If there were no overlap, you wouldn't even have that gradation into yellow at all. You'd get some sort of bungled guess as to what is in between, or even have complete gaps between colors as there would be missing data -- which is where we see blacks, because we aren't getting relevant data for those sections. It'd all just taper off into black in between colors if they didn't overlap at all
@@jotch_7627 If they only had a 0.1 nm offset, then we would have a lot of trouble differentiating yellows and reds. How would the color opponent process even work when the response from the M and L cones is almost always the same? Also, the close M and L sensitivity curves is the reason it is so easy to reproduce the perception of yellow with just red and green light, but impossible to reproduce the perception of cyan (fully saturated) with blue and green light. I can't agree that the difference between the two curves isn't too important.
Not really. The most common type solar panel uses mainly red light to create power and tends to reflect the rest. This is why these type solar panels appear blue in photographs. Green plants don't use the green light either. They absorb the red and blue light and reflect the green light which is why they appear green.
Also, they're mostly not green in the metaphorical sense either. Like sure, having a 20~25% of discontinuous renewables might be doable and cheap, but the network costs (in ecological terms, not just economic) to handle the massive peaks and troughs increase astronomically with an increase of discontinuous renewables' share in the electrical mix. Not to mention the eternal toxic pollution ecessary to extract rare earths for turbines and gold for circuits
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.
Its also the way our eyes are constructed. Our eyes have the fewest receptors for blue light because the atmosphere scatters it every where. If we had an equal number of each cone most of what we would see would be blue.
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.
This is a GREAT explanation of the phenomena. That fact is that all yellow light on your TV or computer screen is also (similarly) made of green and red light. So you could say that the green light that IS there in the sunlight still often appears yellow because it is balanced by the red light, and then the extra yellow and red light that is not scattered by the atmosphere makes the sun appear white-->yellow-->orange-->red depending on how much atmosphere is between your eye and the sun.
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
That is true. Also, the Sun emits roughly equal amounts of energy in the visible and infrared, but since infrared photons have less energy, the infrared photon flux is much greater.
@@ryanthompson3737 A remainder for what was said in the video: 2:30 From the black body spectrum (specifically Wien's displacement law) there is a well defined peak at 500nm = 600THz (for T ~ 5777K), or green photons. However, reparametrizing by frequency there is another well defined peak at 883nm = 340THz or infrared. To extract an intensity you need to specify the bandwidth TLDR: Color can't just be measured by photon wavelength (otherwise magenta wouldn't exist), it is a biological phenomenon. However even as a physicist we can't even agree on would be the predominant "color"
@@enderyu PhD spectroscopist here. "The Measurement of Appearance" by Hunter is a great text that dives deep into quantification of color measurement. The science is a century old but not well known outside the specialty. The dominant color of the Sun is white based on its emission spectra, atmospheric effects and the stimulation of our photoreceptors. THey are saturated becasue of the high intensity incident light and that makes pure white.
I have known about green stars ever seen I looked to the star colours from red to blue and asked where was the green and why were white stars clearly where green stars should be. Ever since then I have been singing the Green Sun Gospel to anyone who dares to ask
i scrolled for the entire video to find a comment like this, i will disturb as many graves as i like. bless you thorny, you're doing no one in particular's work X3
I work at a summer camp and it’s space week. A kid told me that the sun was actually green so now I’ve got to go in tomorrow with a whole color talk because she was right I will say she said her grandpa told her this so I’m guessing he read it somewhere
Kid is wrong. Saying the sun is green is ignoring the fact that it emits nearly as much yellow and blue light as it does green. The sun emits a broad spectrum which mixes together into white. You might as well say pizza is bread, because there's more bread in pizza than any other ingredient.
@@riktol63 it’s an opportunity to talk about how it’s more complex and the sun does not just emit one color. Not all right or all wrong but shades of color in between
@@laurensomething1899 So when you said you were going to have a talk "because she was right" you meant to say "because she was wrong and ignoring some facts but boosting others to fit a certain narrative is bad science".
"Why is it wearing sunglasses, if all the light is coming from the thing itself?" Well, humans wear glasses. The sun wears... sunglasses... Just common sense, really.
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!
This makes so much sense because plants would probably not be able to do anything with all that energy if they absorbed the green light instead the reflect much of that part of the light absorbing the less energetic spectrum. So I suppose if we had a sun that mostly gave off blue light the plants would be blue instead of green... COOL!
@PronatorTendon They're also human and have absolutely done what Herbamachina said. Overall, still one of my favorite science channels. Good rule of thumb is science is always more complicated than represented in a summary
@@BKScience812 Where have they represented preliminary studies as absolute fact? I've never heard anyone on this channel speak the words "absolute fact" You're both dishonest
It's real simple: The sun is white, the very definition of pure white. We draw it yellow because that's the color of sunsets, when we can look at the sun. However, yellow is the color of a sunset, not the sun. The sun is the color of clouds and snow when viewed on a clear day. Yes, more green light comes from the sun than red or blue. However, white light is defined by our brain as mostly green with some red and a touch of blue. White isn't a color, it's a perception.
@@ericjohnson6675 No, because it still looks white if viewed through a neutral filter that reduces its brightness, and white objects illuminated by the sun still look white. It looks white because its spectrum stimulates our photoreceptors in a way that produces the perception of white.
@@fwiffo YES! Our eyes adapted to see noon sunlight as colorless so we can notice the colors of objects in our environment. Sunlight can't be anything other than white, irrespective of its spectrum.
@@fwiffo Becuase on Earth, it saturates our detectors. Filter it down enough and it will have a yellow tinge. It's why starts have apparent color. THey are far enough away that the incident intensity is within the dynamic range of our photoreceptors without them getting bleached.
The sun is green if you change what words mean. I know, peak intensity occurs in the green part of the spectrum, but that's not what it means for something to be green.
Ok, then what does 'green' mean? Single definition only, that accurately describes green paint, blue and yellow mixed paints, and green sunglass lenses.
@@CorwynGC Alhpugh you said, "one definition only" I reject your arbitrary limitation and alternatively submit that green is something that emits or scatters light in the 520-580 nm range at a higher intensely than a black body radiator normalized to its spectrum.
We see colors in relationship to each other. This isn't about electromagnetic wavelengths; it's about how our color perception is built inside. If you surround red by other reddish colors it won't look as bright as when it is surrounded by greenish colors. (These are observations on how pigments look to us; not on how light sources look to us. An important dynamic is that a prism breaks white light into a rainbow: but mix those colors together from their pigments, & you'll get a muddy brown.)
and then you remember that the visible light spectrum is so tiny, compared to the whole of electromagnetic spectrum, that the color of the sun really doesn't matter at all.
WHAT THE HELL!? Literally this morning I was lying awake in bed thinking but how do the different wavelengths of light work and here is this amazing video, really summarizing all my thoughts in a ready to absorb video, very synchronous!
Someone already mentioned about green plants obviously NOT using the (abundant) green wavelengths, and I'd like to see a video about that. Lately I've been wondering why both red and green plants coexist, and why the majority seem to be green.
A quirk of photochemistry and evolution. The chemical that plants use to generate sugar requires the energy from light in the blue range, leaving the reflected light green colored. This was the chemical that early cells developed to perform photosynthesis and it was good enough that it took over the world. Reactions that allowed for absorption of wider spectrums of light may have failed to compete in other ways, or just never formed naturally
In the fall when the chlorophyll molecules break down you get to see what color the leaves actually are. That and green is what the leaf is reflecting. The absent color(s) is what the leaf was using.
A bit of physics pedantry: the light does *not* "wave up and down", as was asserted in this video. It's a common misunderstanding, arising from the way people draw light waves (said drawings also being erroneous.)
When I was a boy in Denver in 1983 we had a kid named Rudy. He insisted when he looked at the Sun he saw a green Ball. Instead of thinking his eyes might be different or that he was imagining things it was seen as a very bad thing. The teacher and his parents saw it as a sign of serious mental illness. The last we ever saw of Rudy was him being taken away by his parents to have a full medical evaluation. But that was 1983...they don't do that now do they? Yes...they still do this even now. My cousin Michael has a son named Christopher who is about 5 years old. He is the same way, when he looks at the sky he sees a green sun. They want him to have his son tested for mental illness. This was 9 months ago. Whether or not colors are inside our brains or not, we take things as fact. The Sky is "Blue", the Sun is "Yellow". The Grass is "Green"" and so on. Peoples that see the world differently often times are made to conform even if it is something that is only in our heads.
The Sun wears sunglasses to be cool, which he isn't. Don't make fun,or he'll go supernova! I don't know what color supernova is, but it can't be good.🌞
It's nonsense sounding because it's nonsense. The sun is not green. The color of something is its perceived color, not its peak wavelength. That's like saying the GDP of a country is the income of its richest person.
@@fwiffo lol. Dude just do a quick google search. NASA confirmed this year's ago. Get over your superiority complex. Not to mention a whole video explaining this exact subject. You gotta be a flat earther.
@@fall3n331 Even in this video they explain that it's not actually green. Having a peak wavelength of green is not the same as being the color green. And "NASA confirmed this years ago" is also nonsense. The spectrum of the sun has been known since before NASA even existed and is something anyone can measure with the appropriate equipment.
I have a small solar telescope and really enjoy observing our nearest star 😎Mr. Sun. When people ask where the nearest star is, I have to laugh, because no one usually thinks about our sun as the nearest star. Thanks for an enlightening video.🤗
So it's actually a happy little accident that the sky in the painting i am making turned out with a strong green tint because i accidentally painted blue color over still wet yellow paint! I love that i can tell someone that it in someway scientifically matches.
For the longest time, I thought scientists were being pedantic when they said "well actually the sun is white", as I just assumed that yeah it's white, but like yellow-white, so saying it's white and not yellow is pedantic. But I eventually realized what I was missing. If you could look at the sun when it's directly overhead without permanently damaging your retinas, it would appear white. The reason people think it's yellow is actually because that's the color it appears when it's lower in sky, where it's slightly less dangerous to look at or near it. The reason it appears yellow is because the sky is blue. Most of the blue light from the sun gets scattered by the sky, so what's left is red+green, which is yellow to us. I know the video mentions this, but since green is the focus of the video it's easy to miss it.
By modal wavelength or frequency (which don't pick the same colour), the Sun may be green. But any such blackbody produces enough red and blue to be white on average, and so stars are in that sense red, blue or white, but never green or purple: ua-cam.com/video/7RPE-_eFBOw/v-deo.html
Exactly. Black body radiation is too broadband to ever appear green. At best, we can see those color because of how the spectrum is sloped. But the sun and starlight do not have narrow band features. If we ever did detect a green star, it means one of two things: something is filtering the star light, or the light source is not black body, hence not stellar emission.
@@zlac In the habitable zone of a different colored star, it would still look white because our photoreceptors would still be saturated. It's only when you get far enough away from a star that it would gain color.
Also most people live in places where the air is polluted, so most people don't see white Sun every day. Also also, during the day (not midday obviously) the darkest part of the sky is directly overhead, as there's the least amount of atmosphere between you and space.
I see the sun mostly as white and yellow, but then sometimes as red or orange. I think it depends on the angle and and proximity of the sun to the sky, and the atmospheric conditions.
Basically, yeah. Essentially the appearance of the sun is just whatever colors are left over after the others have been scattered by the atmosphere. When the sun is directly overhead, it's nearly white; when it's close to the horizon, much more light is scattered so you're left with yellow, then orange, then almost red at the very end of the sunset.
Human eyes are excellent at 'removing green' from our view of the world. We look into a green forest and have no trouble picking out the most subtle shades of 'not green'. Comes in very handy when tracking/hunting.
Thanks, as a child I would often draw the sun in two colors, yellow and light green. That was because I would squint and sometimes look at sun and see it as a very pale green with a yellow corona. I only made it all yellow after all the criticism.
The sun is not green. You never describe the color of an object by the color of its peak wavelength. Your eyes are not spectrometers. It makes no sense to describe it as a "green star" or "green sun". You even say that this description is wrong, but keep using it, and continue to spread this false "factoid". You could have titled the video "Is the sun green?" and then debunked it and gone into the description of how color perception works. It would have also been more effective as a video title and thumbnail. It's like saying the GDP of a country is the income of its richest person. It makes no sense.
Our atmosphere diffuses more of the green than the yellow as well. When you think of the sky, you don't see it as a deeper blue, you think of it as a lightened shade during the day. If ONLY the blue was diffused, that blue would be much deeper, thus a small amount of the green is being captured in the atmosphere, mixing with the blue and giving us that all too familiar light blue tint. We know green gets through more of our atmospheric prism because if it didn't, our plants wouldn't reflect it so vividly, blue is so scattered it almost doesn't exist in nature minus our water in open spaces where the sky is much of all it can reflect; but considering we reflect the colors we don't absorb, that would indicate that most plants evolved -without brains- to absorb the light most often present at ground level for energy production. telling us the sun definitely is green, but that green light isn't as efficient for energy transfer as much of it (along the more blue edge of it's slotting in the visible spectrum) is bouncing throughout our atmosphere with the blue light. That means that the majority of the green we see at ground level is simply drowned out by the sheer amount of un-diffused yellow and red light, and our brains take the mean average of this light bombardment to inform us "the sun is yellow-ish"... so long as we don't think about it too much. Red gets through too but, being a wider wavelength, isn't as intensely represented as yellow at mid day and thus we don't go around saying the sun is red unless the sun is low enough to diffuse much of the yellow waves. This is as good of an explanation of the bridge between reality and our perception as I could come up with in a few minutes 😅enjoy
Yes, astronomy knows this. But when light peaks at green, the difference between r-g-b is minimal, so it is a combination of all 3, so white. Stars that are red peak in IR and have a steeper gradient in visible favoring red; similar for blue peaking in UV.
@@robertfoster347 white to our eye anyway…something different to eyes that might have evolved differently. Think about birds who detect UV - I wonder how they would describe it if they could talk? Blue, purple?
01:22 - That's a little misleading. The electrons in the antenna won't be just flowing one direction like that, they'll be oscillating back and forth in sync with the EM waveform, and thus causing a voltage sine wave to form.
Finally a video that blatantly states that colours are in our brain, not out there. Whenever I say this I get virtually abused that I'm wrong. I mean, like here is a photon, the outside of it is coloured in green, right? In all seriousness though, a better question is, how does our neuronal activity lead to the experience of colour such as green, or any other sensory experience for the matter.
same here. PhD spectroscopist that has done almost 2 decades of color analysis in applied R&D. Its a big misconception people have that color is a physical property and not a spectrum based response in our brains.
That is not be because the sun is green but because your eyelids are kind of pink. After you close your eyelids your retinas are still overstimulated with the sun's overpowering white light and your brain interprets the new darkness with the opposite color of what it should, the opposite colour of pink is green. Look up the "negative afterimage illusion" for more info
Not one of your best video's: I will try and put this simply here, let me know if you think I'm wrong. The Sun is very slightly in the green spectrum. The atmosphere absorbs blue. When the sun is directly overhead its passing through the least atmosphere and the light that reaches us is what we call pure white (the sun is still green). As the day progresses the sun passes through increasing amounts of atmosphere so more blue is absorbed, giving the sun an yellow appearance. One of the main things deceiving people is that all of the pics taken of the sun from space show it as yellow/orange/red. Without atmosphere the sun should appear white with very slight green tint. The answer is filters. Filters are required to take pics from space due to the intensity of the light and those filters turn everything orange.
This is wrong on multiple levels. First, the "stain" should have been red then since such a stain has to be the complementary color, and second, the green stain actually comes from our red eyelids or from a reddish evening, or when you washed your red car in the sun.
The title is a bit misleading. The Sun is only green insofar as its spectrum peaks in wavelength-space blackbody approximation. The Sun is actually white, which is why we can view all colours of the rainbow under sunlight. If the Sun emitted green light, then what we see under visible light would be green.
A cool follow up could be, if the sun gives off mostly green light why do plants reflect the green part of the spectrum. This was a long standing mystery but a paper published in nature I think it was last year pretty much answered the question and it’s pretty cool!
From what I understand, this is wrong. Although the sun releases the most *energy* in the green spectrum ("irradiance"), the highest *number* of photons occur in the red-to-yellow (and IR, but we can't see those). And our eyes don't measure energy, they measure photons. Thus the sun does not appear green, but white (ish) yellow. Please correct me if I'm way off base.
The sun is not green. I thought that was just a fringe video I watched the other day. It shouldn't be said on PBS. That's like saying "The sky is purple." Just look into the sky, and you'll see the sun is actually yellow, or red depending on what time of day it is. If you really want to know the color of the sun, it's white. Because that's the only color it can be.
That's very interesting. I bet that explains why _most_ plants seem to be green too, so that they can maximize the amount of light they can absorb for photosynthesis.
If I look at the sun, I don't see a stable color, it looks, white-ish with a lot of color change per second. Hard to explain, it looks like its flashing extremely fast and inserting random colors frames in between. Also, depending on where you are looking, you can sometime see a greenish tint on the blue in the sky. Like, not a deep blue, but blue with some marine looking green hue over the blue.
looking at that Low Temp gif, i thought my eyes were playing tricks on me when i saw red dots, i had to pause the video to know it was not some kind of visual trick
Visit brilliant.org/scishow/ to get started learning STEM for free. The first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium subscription and a 30-day free trial.
Sunglasses idea: The Sun is like a D&D troll, with active infravision. (Or like Marvel's Cyclops.) It wears the glasses to avoid burning us with its glare...
"Shining a flashlight on a radio antenna doesn't affect reception"
**maniacal laughter with pinky finger in corner of mouth**
**pulls out "laser" and saws it off at the base**
The sun gives off white light which is all colors at once. Your argument is confusing and wrong.
The sun is Chartreuse and a mixture of transgender colors, because the sun is Feminist.
judging by the comments should have put a warning on this video to tell people not to look at the sun, since so many of the viewers/commenters are claiming to stare at the sun and see that it's green
Fun fact: SciShow's boss is Green.
So Hank is the sun? 😅
@@applegal3058 His mom and dad would spell it with an "O".
Fun fact green is green.
Coincidence? I think not.
Don’t you ever insult hank like that ever again.
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.
Here’s the explanation. Green stars emit light of all colors at almost the same quantities and we perceive them as white, because of how human eyes work.
Going into detail, we see no green stars because of 2 factors.
The first factor is how human eyes work. Human eyes have red, green, and blue rods, each of which detect a specific range of colors. These ranges overlap and makes 2 kinds of rods send signals to the brain, which in turn interprets as color. When the eyes receive an approximately equal amount of all colors of the visible light, the brain interprets this as the object being white, even though on average the object has a different color, say green.
The second factor is black body radiation. Star color and luminosity are directly proportional to the star’s temperature and therefore luminosity, however light emitted by stars isn’t monochrome. While green stars emit more green light, they still emit approximately the same amount of light of other colors.
@@adiaphoros6842 See how that isn't short? That's what I was saying.
basically it's because we see green stars as white, right?
it's like when you see a rainbow that isn't perfect (meaning it overlaps itself too much), it goes red-orange-yellow-white-cyan-blue-violet, the yellow-white-cyan part being where there's high levels of green light. it's just that there's too much light of the other colors present for us to see only the green.
...that made more sense in my head, haha
Cool Worlds has a great video ("The Star that Can't Exist") on why green-looking stars are impossible (any size/temperature in the right range for green light to be predominant also produces enough red and blue light to look white to our eyes). In fact, it has been suggested that a star that actually looked green could be a good way to signal that there is an advanced intelligent civilization as it could only be produced artificially.
@@adiaphoros6842 3rd factor - insufficient drugs
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.
I was hoping someone would mention this. I think it's more common to see them at sunset, near the ocean, and higher up (like a cliff side or hill). For those who don't know, you'll only spot this effect just as the last/first spot of light is passing over the horizon.
I saw one once. Mine looked like a pilot light going out on an appliance.
Scishow themselves have a video on this very subject from a few years ago.
I was sure they were gonna bring it up.
There is a Jules Verne novel about this, in Romanian named Raza Verde, loosely translated The Green Ray. 😊
@@nickcurrant2254what are you talking about? Everyone knows it only happens when someone returns from the dead.
"Color is in our brains, not in the world." Welp. I was needing my daily existential crisis. Thank you.
Wait tell you research why purple isn’t a real color….
@@Clutch4IceCream It isn't a spectral color, but it's just as real as any other color.
@@DANGJOS What we call purple isn't the violet light that a prism produces. In fact, our eyes can't really perceive that color of violet.
Deconstructionist wordplay word salad confuses the uninitiated.
Search "Magenta doesn't exist"
As someone who is colorblind, I find this sort of thing very interesting.
Fun fact, plants are green because they DON'T use green light for photosynthesis.
@@paddor 😅😅😅
@@paddor you're annoying.
Plants are green because they are envious of animals being able to move around.... everyone knows this .,...
@@paddor you understood me, so I used language effectively. However, thank you for the reminder.
@@paddor .I.. ..I.
Those are two birdies...
For you....
Cause we must allow you to exist among us, but we are not required to respect you.
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.
And the way our brain takes light of a variety of colors and interprets it as a color that may not be present much at all. Something "yellow" might be reflecting mostly green and red light. Or it might actually be reflecting yellow light.
@@SuprousOxide We can't see purple or pink. Purple is our brains interpreting a combination of blue and red light as the color purple.
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.
i mean. does it? the overlap is crucial for our vision to work at all, but ill assume you meant that medium and long cone response curves overlap quite a lot. im unconvinced this matters much, though, because from a mathematical standpoint all thats required is for each wavelength to map to a unique linear combination of responses (in other words, these responses could be identical save for a 0.1nm offset and the math would be the same). factor in some headroom because biology is messy and it seems our bodies have a perfectly fine system for discerning wavelengths
@@jotch_7627 Color vision is essentially the proportionate response of the three, broadband color receptors in our eyes. Two of those do have a lot of overlap. Color is based on the ratio of how the three are stimulated and why we have 3 primary colors in our color wheel. But you can have 2 completely different spectra that elicit identical spectral response in the photoreceptors so they appear as identical colors. A good, fundamental text in color science is Hunter's "The Measurement of Appearance" and its a deep dive into color science. I spent 17 years doing color analysis and had to write my own code to take measured visible light spectra and convert them to color conformity for ASTM, ANSIm CEN and ISO color standards.
@@jotch_7627 Except Our eyes only capture raw sensory data and it's our brain which does the processing. A good portion of our brain is devoted to visual processing aka perception: Occipital (mainly) and Parietal (somewhat) regions of our brain. We don't correctly discern wavelengths (colors): for instance, color constancy. We see colors subjectively and the perceived color is constant under different light conditions. For instance a white ball. We will perceive it as a white ball under many lighting scenarios. This creates all sorts of issues especially if you're an artist trying to paint a still life or a plein air landscape. Artists understand that colors are very relative (including other dimensions such as value and chroma) and depend on context: what it is next to. Checker shadow illusion is mindblowing and while it uses grayscale, it can be done using colors.
@@jotch_7627 yeah, the overlap is actually critical in actually even having *any* sort of color perception. If there were no overlap, you wouldn't even have that gradation into yellow at all. You'd get some sort of bungled guess as to what is in between, or even have complete gaps between colors as there would be missing data -- which is where we see blacks, because we aren't getting relevant data for those sections. It'd all just taper off into black in between colors if they didn't overlap at all
@@jotch_7627 If they only had a 0.1 nm offset, then we would have a lot of trouble differentiating yellows and reds. How would the color opponent process even work when the response from the M and L cones is almost always the same? Also, the close M and L sensitivity curves is the reason it is so easy to reproduce the perception of yellow with just red and green light, but impossible to reproduce the perception of cyan (fully saturated) with blue and green light. I can't agree that the difference between the two curves isn't too important.
So a solar farm for electricity is "Green Energy" in more than just the metaphorical sense. Neato!
Not really. The most common type solar panel uses mainly red light to create power and tends to reflect the rest. This is why these type solar panels appear blue in photographs. Green plants don't use the green light either. They absorb the red and blue light and reflect the green light which is why they appear green.
Also, they're mostly not green in the metaphorical sense either. Like sure, having a 20~25% of discontinuous renewables might be doable and cheap, but the network costs (in ecological terms, not just economic) to handle the massive peaks and troughs increase astronomically with an increase of discontinuous renewables' share in the electrical mix. Not to mention the eternal toxic pollution ecessary to extract rare earths for turbines and gold for circuits
And that isn't even taking into account the massive amount of thrash they will generate when they break down
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.
I see it as basically auto white balance.
Its also the way our eyes are constructed. Our eyes have the fewest receptors for blue light because the atmosphere scatters it every where. If we had an equal number of each cone most of what we would see would be blue.
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.
Color perception is WEIRD!
This is a much better explanation than the video. Thanks
This is a GREAT explanation of the phenomena. That fact is that all yellow light on your TV or computer screen is also (similarly) made of green and red light. So you could say that the green light that IS there in the sunlight still often appears yellow because it is balanced by the red light, and then the extra yellow and red light that is not scattered by the atmosphere makes the sun appear white-->yellow-->orange-->red depending on how much atmosphere is between your eye and the sun.
i think you wanted to say, ... produce the yellow which is added to the original yellow.
Ha! I always thought the reason sunsets were orange was because light had to travel through more air...thanks for confirming that!
big brain moment.
Refractive index of various wavelengths of the light spectrum.
@@roystonboodoo7525 the magnum reflux of the electro-magnetic spectral quantum state causes the entanglement ion fluctuations to quantum tunnel. 🤓
@@matrikater 🙂
It's taught in school?
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
That is true. Also, the Sun emits roughly equal amounts of energy in the visible and infrared, but since infrared photons have less energy, the infrared photon flux is much greater.
Thanks for repeating exactly what was said in the video.
@@ryanthompson3737 A remainder for what was said in the video: 2:30
From the black body spectrum (specifically Wien's displacement law) there is a well defined peak at 500nm = 600THz (for T ~ 5777K), or green photons. However, reparametrizing by frequency there is another well defined peak at 883nm = 340THz or infrared. To extract an intensity you need to specify the bandwidth
TLDR: Color can't just be measured by photon wavelength (otherwise magenta wouldn't exist), it is a biological phenomenon. However even as a physicist we can't even agree on would be the predominant "color"
@@enderyu PhD spectroscopist here. "The Measurement of Appearance" by Hunter is a great text that dives deep into quantification of color measurement. The science is a century old but not well known outside the specialty. The dominant color of the Sun is white based on its emission spectra, atmospheric effects and the stimulation of our photoreceptors. THey are saturated becasue of the high intensity incident light and that makes pure white.
@@enderyu re.. last sentence.. then y'all would make great economists, lol.
I have been waiting for this moment my whole life.
I have known about green stars ever seen I looked to the star colours from red to blue and asked where was the green and why were white stars clearly where green stars should be. Ever since then I have been singing the Green Sun Gospel to anyone who dares to ask
You're telling me that The Green Sun is real? It always come back to Homestuck.
real
Having a phone with a messed up screen this statement couldn't be more true
The nature of humanity is just that every so often someone accidentally invents Homestuck again
I’m both glad and very upset that the comment I was looking for is here.
@@robertluceon3461 LOLLLLL I scrolled a bit and didn't see any mention of it so I knew what I had to do
Why was I looking for this
feeling disappointed by how little i had to scroll to find homestuck's grave disturbed again. it's been 7 years... let it rest
i scrolled for the entire video to find a comment like this, i will disturb as many graves as i like. bless you thorny, you're doing no one in particular's work X3
The sun wears sunglasses to protect us. Those are it's craziest flares.
I work at a summer camp and it’s space week. A kid told me that the sun was actually green so now I’ve got to go in tomorrow with a whole color talk because she was right
I will say she said her grandpa told her this so I’m guessing he read it somewhere
Kid is wrong. Saying the sun is green is ignoring the fact that it emits nearly as much yellow and blue light as it does green. The sun emits a broad spectrum which mixes together into white. You might as well say pizza is bread, because there's more bread in pizza than any other ingredient.
@@riktol63 No. It mixes together into light green.
@@riktol63 it’s an opportunity to talk about how it’s more complex and the sun does not just emit one color. Not all right or all wrong but shades of color in between
@@riktol63 kid could have more color cones than normal and perceive the sun as green. Or they too heard this funfact somewhere
@@laurensomething1899 So when you said you were going to have a talk "because she was right" you meant to say "because she was wrong and ignoring some facts but boosting others to fit a certain narrative is bad science".
That's it. I'm drawing the sun green from now on.
Na, he clearly stated the sun is mostly infrared,, so that's how I'm ganna draw mine!
@@Swiftkitten88 No, he clearly stated that color is in our brains, so you gotta draw each wavelength of light if you want true accuracy!
@@Swiftkitten88 Good luck getting infrared crayons :D
@@TheFlyingDogFish I guess putting them in the microwave might work
@@Swiftkitten88sun is white bro like plasma thunder
"Why is it wearing sunglasses, if all the light is coming from the thing itself?"
Well, humans wear glasses. The sun wears... sunglasses... Just common sense, really.
To look cool, because it's so hot.
It's getting on in years, and contact lenses can cause sunspots.
So we wear manglasses? Neat
@@AngelaAmaryllis without the sunglasses, the sun would be 50,000K and we would be fried
@@Flesh_Wizard I think I would be okay with that.
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!
The sun wears shades because he's doing alright and getting good grades. His futures so bright he's gotta wear shades.
This makes so much sense because plants would probably not be able to do anything with all that energy if they absorbed the green light instead the reflect much of that part of the light absorbing the less energetic spectrum. So I suppose if we had a sun that mostly gave off blue light the plants would be blue instead of green... COOL!
Yk I’ve always been in awe how accurate this channel has always been with scientific discovery’s without errors
they've learned the consequences of making fallible statements by crucifixion in the comment section.
@@HerbaMachina Don't they generally offer caveats and advise tentative acceptance?
@PronatorTendon They're also human and have absolutely done what Herbamachina said. Overall, still one of my favorite science channels. Good rule of thumb is science is always more complicated than represented in a summary
@@BKScience812 Where have they represented preliminary studies as absolute fact? I've never heard anyone on this channel speak the words "absolute fact"
You're both dishonest
👍🏼
It's real simple: The sun is white, the very definition of pure white. We draw it yellow because that's the color of sunsets, when we can look at the sun. However, yellow is the color of a sunset, not the sun. The sun is the color of clouds and snow when viewed on a clear day.
Yes, more green light comes from the sun than red or blue. However, white light is defined by our brain as mostly green with some red and a touch of blue. White isn't a color, it's a perception.
The sun is so bright that it saturates our photoreceptors so it looks pure white.
@@ericjohnson6675 No, because it still looks white if viewed through a neutral filter that reduces its brightness, and white objects illuminated by the sun still look white. It looks white because its spectrum stimulates our photoreceptors in a way that produces the perception of white.
@@fwiffo YES! Our eyes adapted to see noon sunlight as colorless so we can notice the colors of objects in our environment. Sunlight can't be anything other than white, irrespective of its spectrum.
@@fwiffo Becuase on Earth, it saturates our detectors. Filter it down enough and it will have a yellow tinge. It's why starts have apparent color. THey are far enough away that the incident intensity is within the dynamic range of our photoreceptors without them getting bleached.
People: The sun is obviously yellow!
SciShow: The sun is actually green!
Me: When I stare at the sun, it turns blue. 🙃
Oh my god, Hussie predicted it.
YEA
The sun is green if you change what words mean.
I know, peak intensity occurs in the green part of the spectrum, but that's not what it means for something to be green.
Ok, then what does 'green' mean? Single definition only, that accurately describes green paint, blue and yellow mixed paints, and green sunglass lenses.
Thank you. They actually showed plancks spectral curve and the YELLOW class G star on the graphic, but just did not mention both at all.
@@CorwynGC Light which stimulates the OPN1MW protein more intensely than the OPN1SW and OPN1LW proteins combined.
@@CorwynGC Alhpugh you said, "one definition only" I reject your arbitrary limitation and alternatively submit that green is something that emits or scatters light in the 520-580 nm range at a higher intensely than a black body radiator normalized to its spectrum.
@@FourthRoot doesn't cover gren filters nor blue plus yellow,which emits LESS green then black body at 550nm.
We see colors in relationship to each other. This isn't about electromagnetic wavelengths; it's about how our color perception is built inside. If you surround red by other reddish colors it won't look as bright as when it is surrounded by greenish colors. (These are observations on how pigments look to us; not on how light sources look to us. An important dynamic is that a prism breaks white light into a rainbow: but mix those colors together from their pigments, & you'll get a muddy brown.)
As for the closest crayon, anyone else still miss Lemon Yellow for drawing the sun?
and then you remember that the visible light spectrum is so tiny, compared to the whole of electromagnetic spectrum, that the color of the sun really doesn't matter at all.
WHAT THE HELL!? Literally this morning I was lying awake in bed thinking but how do the different wavelengths of light work and here is this amazing video, really summarizing all my thoughts in a ready to absorb video, very synchronous!
I remember reading about the green light many years ago. Bad Astronomy by Philip Plaitt.
Someone already mentioned about green plants obviously NOT using the (abundant) green wavelengths, and I'd like to see a video about that. Lately I've been wondering why both red and green plants coexist, and why the majority seem to be green.
A quirk of photochemistry and evolution. The chemical that plants use to generate sugar requires the energy from light in the blue range, leaving the reflected light green colored. This was the chemical that early cells developed to perform photosynthesis and it was good enough that it took over the world.
Reactions that allowed for absorption of wider spectrums of light may have failed to compete in other ways, or just never formed naturally
@@SuprousOxide Thanks for the thoughtful answer!
In the fall when the chlorophyll molecules break down you get to see what color the leaves actually are. That and green is what the leaf is reflecting. The absent color(s) is what the leaf was using.
A bit of physics pedantry: the light does *not* "wave up and down", as was asserted in this video. It's a common misunderstanding, arising from the way people draw light waves (said drawings also being erroneous.)
Similarly my gin and tonic is mostly water while water isn't its defining characteristic.
Shine a black light on your drink some time
@@DrDeuteron I prefer the tonic mixer because of the phosphorescent quinine, but I don't hang out near black lights as much as I used to.
When I was a boy in Denver in 1983 we had a kid named Rudy. He insisted when he looked at the Sun he saw a green Ball. Instead of thinking his eyes might be different or that he was imagining things it was seen as a very bad thing. The teacher and his parents saw it as a sign of serious mental illness. The last we ever saw of Rudy was him being taken away by his parents to have a full medical evaluation.
But that was 1983...they don't do that now do they? Yes...they still do this even now. My cousin Michael has a son named Christopher who is about 5 years old. He is the same way, when he looks at the sky he sees a green sun. They want him to have his son tested for mental illness. This was 9 months ago.
Whether or not colors are inside our brains or not, we take things as fact. The Sky is "Blue", the Sun is "Yellow". The Grass is "Green"" and so on. Peoples that see the world differently often times are made to conform even if it is something that is only in our heads.
I think the obvious action would be to test them for colour blindness.
@@massimookissed1023 Or to test them for eye damage since they've been staring at the sun.
The Sun wears sunglasses to be cool, which he isn't. Don't make fun,or he'll go supernova! I don't know what color supernova is, but it can't be good.🌞
Sun wears glasses because you're cleared the minefield.
this is one of my favorite nonsense sounding trivia facts to hit people with, I'm so glad you did a video on it!
It's nonsense sounding because it's nonsense. The sun is not green. The color of something is its perceived color, not its peak wavelength. That's like saying the GDP of a country is the income of its richest person.
@@fwiffo lol. Dude just do a quick google search. NASA confirmed this year's ago. Get over your superiority complex. Not to mention a whole video explaining this exact subject. You gotta be a flat earther.
@@fall3n331 Even in this video they explain that it's not actually green. Having a peak wavelength of green is not the same as being the color green. And "NASA confirmed this years ago" is also nonsense. The spectrum of the sun has been known since before NASA even existed and is something anyone can measure with the appropriate equipment.
always thought the reason sunsets were orange was because light had to travel through more air always dear
Just dust...
@@tomtheplummer7322 Thank you so much
4:36 - 4:44 👏👏👏 10/10 on this brilliant transition to Brilliant 😅
"The Sun Is Green"
*Homestuck police would like to know your location*
I have a small solar telescope and really enjoy observing our nearest star 😎Mr. Sun. When people ask where the nearest star is, I have to laugh, because no one usually thinks about our sun as the nearest star. Thanks for an enlightening video.🤗
We should have a paper describing what happens if the sun actually had sunglasses that large.
But.... _why?_
@@philipm3173 Why not? 😎
@@YuBeace A study is something done of things that can be observed
@@philipm3173 Science! It would be an interesting thought experiment.
@@sirsweet3022 the plastic would be immediately obliterated into plasma. Ta da
Green flash sunsets are a thing cameras can pick up. It's kinda cool looking.
The Earth Is Blue As An Orange
Purple and green together forever.
So it's actually a happy little accident that the sky in the painting i am making turned out with a strong green tint because i accidentally painted blue color over still wet yellow paint! I love that i can tell someone that it in someway scientifically matches.
Bob Ross would agree.
It's really all colors cause it's a freakin star. Got it
I've always been confused by people painting the sun as yellow. It looks white to me apart from sunrise and sunset when it's red/orange.
Its green becasue we put Jello lime power in it. Thats what the goverment wont tell you.
For the longest time, I thought scientists were being pedantic when they said "well actually the sun is white", as I just assumed that yeah it's white, but like yellow-white, so saying it's white and not yellow is pedantic. But I eventually realized what I was missing.
If you could look at the sun when it's directly overhead without permanently damaging your retinas, it would appear white. The reason people think it's yellow is actually because that's the color it appears when it's lower in sky, where it's slightly less dangerous to look at or near it. The reason it appears yellow is because the sky is blue. Most of the blue light from the sun gets scattered by the sky, so what's left is red+green, which is yellow to us. I know the video mentions this, but since green is the focus of the video it's easy to miss it.
Yes! The corona absolutely looked green to me during the 2017 eclipse
Ive never seen that slowmotion of a barcode scanner before. Now it all makes sense
By modal wavelength or frequency (which don't pick the same colour), the Sun may be green. But any such blackbody produces enough red and blue to be white on average, and so stars are in that sense red, blue or white, but never green or purple: ua-cam.com/video/7RPE-_eFBOw/v-deo.html
I read somewhere that if we evolved on a planet with red sun, we would see our sun as white, and all other stars as white, green or blue.
They also produce enough infrared and ultraviolet to not be red or blue, but your eyes are too inferior to see those.
Exactly. Black body radiation is too broadband to ever appear green. At best, we can see those color because of how the spectrum is sloped. But the sun and starlight do not have narrow band features. If we ever did detect a green star, it means one of two things: something is filtering the star light, or the light source is not black body, hence not stellar emission.
@@zlac In the habitable zone of a different colored star, it would still look white because our photoreceptors would still be saturated. It's only when you get far enough away from a star that it would gain color.
Also most people live in places where the air is polluted, so most people don't see white Sun every day.
Also also, during the day (not midday obviously) the darkest part of the sky is directly overhead, as there's the least amount of atmosphere between you and space.
I see the sun mostly as white and yellow, but then sometimes as red or orange. I think it depends on the angle and and proximity of the sun to the sky, and the atmospheric conditions.
Basically, yeah. Essentially the appearance of the sun is just whatever colors are left over after the others have been scattered by the atmosphere. When the sun is directly overhead, it's nearly white; when it's close to the horizon, much more light is scattered so you're left with yellow, then orange, then almost red at the very end of the sunset.
proximity has nothing to do with it
Wow! I always thought of the sun as an almost white pale blue, because of how much bluer sunlight looks than most indoor lighting. Very cool!
Top tip : Don’t look at the midday sun, its really bright, only a take quick peak at the occasional sunrise or sunset.
Or use a camera
The sun sometimes actually flashes green just before it disappears after sun set.
Laughs in homestuck
This video is best summarized by Dr. Spaceman "Science is whatever we want it to be"
hello homestucks
Human eyes are excellent at 'removing green' from our view of the world.
We look into a green forest and have no trouble picking out the most subtle shades of 'not green'.
Comes in very handy when tracking/hunting.
Thanks, as a child I would often draw the sun in two colors, yellow and light green. That was because I would squint and sometimes look at sun and see it as a very pale green with a yellow corona. I only made it all yellow after all the criticism.
the green you were seeing was probably the damage to your retina
Hank is also yellow but is truly green, I sense a conspiracy!
Next video: "humans are made out of pineapple pizzas"
I am sure this would make a fantastic episode for the SciShow Kids Channel (after proper adaptation that is)
The sun is not green. You never describe the color of an object by the color of its peak wavelength. Your eyes are not spectrometers. It makes no sense to describe it as a "green star" or "green sun". You even say that this description is wrong, but keep using it, and continue to spread this false "factoid". You could have titled the video "Is the sun green?" and then debunked it and gone into the description of how color perception works. It would have also been more effective as a video title and thumbnail.
It's like saying the GDP of a country is the income of its richest person. It makes no sense.
Our atmosphere diffuses more of the green than the yellow as well. When you think of the sky, you don't see it as a deeper blue, you think of it as a lightened shade during the day. If ONLY the blue was diffused, that blue would be much deeper, thus a small amount of the green is being captured in the atmosphere, mixing with the blue and giving us that all too familiar light blue tint.
We know green gets through more of our atmospheric prism because if it didn't, our plants wouldn't reflect it so vividly, blue is so scattered it almost doesn't exist in nature minus our water in open spaces where the sky is much of all it can reflect; but considering we reflect the colors we don't absorb, that would indicate that most plants evolved -without brains- to absorb the light most often present at ground level for energy production. telling us the sun definitely is green, but that green light isn't as efficient for energy transfer as much of it (along the more blue edge of it's slotting in the visible spectrum) is bouncing throughout our atmosphere with the blue light.
That means that the majority of the green we see at ground level is simply drowned out by the sheer amount of un-diffused yellow and red light, and our brains take the mean average of this light bombardment to inform us "the sun is yellow-ish"... so long as we don't think about it too much. Red gets through too but, being a wider wavelength, isn't as intensely represented as yellow at mid day and thus we don't go around saying the sun is red unless the sun is low enough to diffuse much of the yellow waves.
This is as good of an explanation of the bridge between reality and our perception as I could come up with in a few minutes 😅enjoy
Actually the sun is a G2 star and it’s color is “defined” as white, I.e, all visible colors. Otherwise, well done…
Some colors are brighter than others
Yes, astronomy knows this. But when light peaks at green, the difference between r-g-b is minimal, so it is a combination of all 3, so white. Stars that are red peak in IR and have a steeper gradient in visible favoring red; similar for blue peaking in UV.
@@robertfoster347 white to our eye anyway…something different to eyes that might have evolved differently. Think about birds who detect UV - I wonder how they would describe it if they could talk? Blue, purple?
01:22 - That's a little misleading. The electrons in the antenna won't be just flowing one direction like that, they'll be oscillating back and forth in sync with the EM waveform, and thus causing a voltage sine wave to form.
Homestuck fans be like
Finally a video that blatantly states that colours are in our brain, not out there. Whenever I say this I get virtually abused that I'm wrong.
I mean, like here is a photon, the outside of it is coloured in green, right?
In all seriousness though, a better question is, how does our neuronal activity lead to the experience of colour such as green, or any other sensory experience for the matter.
same here. PhD spectroscopist that has done almost 2 decades of color analysis in applied R&D. Its a big misconception people have that color is a physical property and not a spectrum based response in our brains.
If you look into bright light or sun, once you close your eyes you will see mostly green spots
That is not be because the sun is green but because your eyelids are kind of pink. After you close your eyelids your retinas are still overstimulated with the sun's overpowering white light and your brain interprets the new darkness with the opposite color of what it should, the opposite colour of pink is green. Look up the "negative afterimage illusion" for more info
That's not because the sun is green, because it's not green, and it's also something you shouldn't do.
Not one of your best video's: I will try and put this simply here, let me know if you think I'm wrong. The Sun is very slightly in the green spectrum. The atmosphere absorbs blue. When the sun is directly overhead its passing through the least atmosphere and the light that reaches us is what we call pure white (the sun is still green). As the day progresses the sun passes through increasing amounts of atmosphere so more blue is absorbed, giving the sun an yellow appearance. One of the main things deceiving people is that all of the pics taken of the sun from space show it as yellow/orange/red. Without atmosphere the sun should appear white with very slight green tint. The answer is filters. Filters are required to take pics from space due to the intensity of the light and those filters turn everything orange.
I like to think this is why when you go inside into a dark room, everything is stained green for a minute!
This is wrong on multiple levels. First, the "stain" should have been red then since such a stain has to be the complementary color, and second, the green stain actually comes from our red eyelids or from a reddish evening, or when you washed your red car in the sun.
@@antonk.653 Dude I know.
The title is a bit misleading. The Sun is only green insofar as its spectrum peaks in wavelength-space blackbody approximation. The Sun is actually white, which is why we can view all colours of the rainbow under sunlight. If the Sun emitted green light, then what we see under visible light would be green.
Homestuck.
Police! Police! Joke thief! My joke's been stolen!
Lil soo happy to have this video, people never believe me when told them it was white with a tint of green
Homestuck
That is all.
A cool follow up could be, if the sun gives off mostly green light why do plants reflect the green part of the spectrum. This was a long standing mystery but a paper published in nature I think it was last year pretty much answered the question and it’s pretty cool!
HOMESTUCK
Colours are not in our brains, they're in our minds. There is a difference.
I love this! So much great info!
It just turns out green is the most confusing color for our photoreceptors. Fantastic, brain farts out yellow.
During the phrase "give off different wavelengths" my phone's night mode kicked in and the whole screen went more orange.
From what I understand, this is wrong. Although the sun releases the most *energy* in the green spectrum ("irradiance"), the highest *number* of photons occur in the red-to-yellow (and IR, but we can't see those). And our eyes don't measure energy, they measure photons. Thus the sun does not appear green, but white (ish) yellow.
Please correct me if I'm way off base.
The sun is not green. I thought that was just a fringe video I watched the other day. It shouldn't be said on PBS. That's like saying "The sky is purple." Just look into the sky, and you'll see the sun is actually yellow, or red depending on what time of day it is.
If you really want to know the color of the sun, it's white. Because that's the only color it can be.
Wearing green tinted goggles helps a lot in sunlight.
That’s inclusive, sun is the color it wants to be!
Shpongle's song "Star Shpongled Banner" has the lyric, "I am a shaman, magician, the sun is purple."
We see green sunsets in Hawaii occasionally it goes thru the whole spectrum
That's very interesting. I bet that explains why _most_ plants seem to be green too, so that they can maximize the amount of light they can absorb for photosynthesis.
No, sorry. Plants look green, because they *reflect* green light. They use very distinct shades of blue and red for photosynthesis.
@@andrebartels1690 Which is weird, because it would seem most efficent to specialize it the most abundent wavelength. But there it is.
If I look at the sun, I don't see a stable color, it looks, white-ish with a lot of color change per second. Hard to explain, it looks like its flashing extremely fast and inserting random colors frames in between. Also, depending on where you are looking, you can sometime see a greenish tint on the blue in the sky. Like, not a deep blue, but blue with some marine looking green hue over the blue.
looking at that Low Temp gif, i thought my eyes were playing tricks on me when i saw red dots, i had to pause the video to know it was not some kind of visual trick
I can't believe the homestuck sun is real
Light is not wave or particle.
It's just the instant of creation of space.