Is the colour of sun yellow or white? Twitter gets into debate

A post on Twitter recently started a debate about whether the colour of the sun is white or yellow.

The debate started when writer Jacqui Deevoy tweeted last week that her childhood's round yellow sun had suddenly turned white and looked wonky.

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In some days, the social media post received more than six million views and left the users divided into two camps – those who believed that the sun was always white and those who agreed that the yellow sun now looks white.

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This debate over the colour of the star of our solar system raised a very curious question – what indeed is the colour of the sun: yellow or white?

As per the scientists, the star has a bit of both, but neither of them is its colour. Sun is actually green.

Project scientist of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory W Dean Pesnell said, “The sun would appear green if your eye could handle looking at it.”

“Basically, when you look at the sun, it has enough of all the different colours in it and it’s so bright that everybody’s eyes are firing like crazy and saying, ‘It’s too bright for me to tell you what colour it is.’ That’s why the sun looks white to us,” he added.

Pesnell explained that the star, which is 93 million miles away from Earth, usually appears like a white spot in the sky. However, many believe that it is yellow because of the way the light is scattered, he added.

Pesnell said that the molecules present in the air redirect the blue and violet wavelengths of the sunlight which allows more red and yellow wavelengths to hit one's eyes.

“Essentially, it’s a green star that looks white because it’s too bright, and it can also appear yellow, orange or red because of how our atmosphere works,” Pesnell said.

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“What we perceive as the sun’s hue is really light bouncing off surfaces. When it comes to stars, colour equals temperature,” said Pesnell. He added that the star is hot, it gives off blue light and the cooler ones appear red.

With a temperature that hit 27 million degrees Fahrenheit in the sun's core, the star is “somewhere in the middle, in this weird space where we can’t perceive its colour,” Pesnell added, further stating that the glowing mass of gases is likely to change hues after millions of years.

“The sun is at its midlife, and it still has quite a lot of years before it changes colours. It still hasn’t dimmed out one bit,” Pesnell stated.

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