• Question: why is the sun yellow?

    Asked by Martyna to Paul, Laura on 9 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Paul O'Mahoney

      Paul O'Mahoney answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      The sun is actually white! Because it contains all the colours of visible light they all merge together to produce white. However, a lot of these colours are scattered out by the Earths atmosphere (part of the reason why the sky looks blue too), so when we look at the sun from Earth (not directly of course, that can damage your eyes!), it appears yellowish. From space, the sun looks very much white:

    • Photo: Laura Haworth

      Laura Haworth answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      Greg is right. The sun is white due to the mixture of all the visible colours. When we see a rainbow this light from the sun being separated into its’ separate colours. Each colour is made up of a different size of wavelength.
      We see the sun as the yellow/red colour this is because the short-wavelength colours (green, blue, violet) are scattered out by the Earth’s atmosphere, only the reds, yellows, and oranges get through the thick atmosphere to our eyes!

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