Friday 6 November 2009

The Average Color Of The Universe


See the picture above? That's the average color of the universe. More precisely, if the entire sky were smeared out, the final mix would be this color, a shade of beige. To determine this, astronomers computationally averaged the light emitted by one of the largest sample of galaxies yet analyzed: the 200,000 galaxies of the 2dF survey.

The resulting cosmic spectrum has some emission in all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, but a single perceived composite color. This color has become much less blue over the past 10 billion years, indicating that redder stars are becoming more prevalent.

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