Oops! Astronomers Say Universe Is Beige, Not Green

Gauracandra · March 11, 2002

March 7

— By Deborah Zabarenko

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Red-faced astronomers said Thursday they were mistaken when they reported that the universe is light green. It's really beige.

"It was more colorful than it should have been, unfortunately," said Ivan Baldry, a post-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University who co-authored the scholarly paper that gave the color of all the light in the universe.

"It's much closer to white, really," Baldry said in a telephone interview. "More like cream."

Baldry and Karl Glazebrook, an assistant professor of astronomy at the university, presented data at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January finding that the color of the universe was a bit greener than pale turquoise.

The notion of stating a definitive color of all the universe's light was a whimsical one, destined to be nothing more than a footnote in their final paper, Baldry said.

Finding the color was a byproduct of an examination of some 200,000 galaxies to determine the rate of star birth as the universe aged.

By giving a numeric value to the colors of the different galaxies, adding them together and then averaging them, they came up with their color, which they dubbed cosmic spectrum green.

But soon after this finding was announced, Mark Fairchild at the Munsell Color Science Laboratories at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York contacted them to say that the computer program the Hopkins astronomers used inappropriately had set a feature known as the "white point."

The white point is the point at which light appears white to the human eye in different kinds of illumination. The Hopkins astronomers' white point was redder than it should have been, as if the universe was viewed under red neon light.

"It's our fault for not taking the color science seriously enough," Glazebrook said in a statement. "I'm very embarrassed. I don't like being wrong, but once I found out I was, I knew I had to get the word out."

The new color of the universe, as viewed from outside the universe from a dark environment, is very light beige, but Baldry and Glazebrook do not much care for that term.

In an updated version of their findings, they showed a patch of a color just slightly darker than a white eggshell.

"Good luck if you can see the difference between this color and white!" they wrote. "Suggestions for the name are welcome. As long as it is not 'beige'!"