While camping, I noticed that if you look long enough at almost any star, you start seeing some tiny, subtle colors in that star. Even crazier, they sometimes flicker between more colors. In my case orange, blue and something like cyan.
Besides constellations, what else could you observe regarding starts, with the naked eye?
I think the flickering and maybe even (some of) the colors are caused by earth’s atmosphere messing with the light.
Most of the more exotic colors (such as green) are caused by various optical tricks.
Physically speaking, all true stars are roughly one of these colors:
- Red
- Orange
- Yellow
- White
- Blue
The exact color of a star depends on its size/temperature. Red stars are the coolest, while blue stars are the hottest.
There are in fact no green stars at all. At least not to human eyes. Very cool and interesting stuff.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/why-arent-there-any-green-stars
So not only are we the goldilocks of planet position in the solar system, we are also the goldilocks of star temperature?
No, the sun is actually white. It looks yellow(or red, when closer to the horizon) for the same reason the sky looks blue, rayleigh scattering.
Had we evolved under a red star, I’m pretty sure we’d be saying our star was “white”. We have eyes which were optimised for the frequency spectra of our star.
The stars actually aren’t changing color (besides variables potentially but they don’t change in seconds), they’re changing cause the atmosphere is distorting as the light reaches your eye - one of the reasons we put observatories on like mountain tops and space is that there isn’t as much atmosphere distorting the light (there’s some newer observatories that can counter-distort their mirror to cancel out atmospheric scintillation).
You can see the milky way if you go somewhere with low light pollution! It’s quite breathtaking. Also every star you see with your eyes is in the milky way. You can also see planets with your eyes, but I think that’s just Venus (which is reflective enough to see) they look like stars but move day to day. You can see some supernovae when they happen, sometimes they’re bright enough you can see then in daytime even. The movement of the stars over the year is highly predictable, even over centuries and milleniallia, some of the real old old structures like Stonehenge are aligned with the movement of the night sky. Because our planet rotates, the stars move, except (if you’re in the northern hemisphere) for Polaris which only kinda wobbles over a year - it wasn’t always Polaris, it had historically been other stars (were talking long long ago history not a lifetime lol), Polaris is in Ursa Minor in the night sky if you wanna find it 😀
If you keep a journal of the night sky you’ll probably notice a lot of the same stuff our ancient ancestors did! We have the disadvantage of light pollution but the advantage of thousands of years of scientific advancement and written and oral knowledge.
How stoned were you when you posted this?
It would be much more surprising if they didn’t have any colour. How would that even work?
Talking about stars and light, white is the opposite of a non-color. It’s all the colors all at once. Black is the only nob-color. Our sun isn’t actually white, it emits a broad spectrum of light which appears white to our eyes, it actually emits more green to blue-green light than anything else. Look-up the sun’s spectrum or the main sequence of stars and you’ll see what I mean.
