what color is the sun?

Answer 1

Outside the atmosphere, the sun would appear to us to be closer to white with possibly a slightly greenish tinge, rather than the yellow colour which we see from Earth, caused mostly by the scattering of light in the atmosphere.

It's colour temperature doesn't necessarily have to match its apparent colour to the eye for a number of complex reasons.

The solar colour temperature of 5776 K means that its spectrum of wavelengths of emitted light peaks in the yellowish part of the spectrum, but the human eye is more sensitive in the yellow-green part of the spectrum and some insects see the sun as blue or violet, since their photochemistry and range of sensitivity is different than those of human eyes.


See:
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/dec99/945169710.As.r.html

Answer 2

The sun's the color of the rainbow, but all those colors mixed together make the color the sun's usually seen in--orange. You can only see the other colors with special cameras and stuff. The sun's light is also the color of the rainbow, but it seems white because they're all blended together.

Answer 3

The above is supposed to show, as accurately as possible on a computer screen, how the colour of a radiating blackbody varies with its temperature. The two vertical bars of colour at each end of the colour chart are the colours at zero and infinite temperature. Evidently the limiting colours are not much different from the colours at 1,000 K and 50,000 K. I confess a little disappointment at the high temperature result: I was hoping that the colour there would be more violet.

The chromaticity diagram at right shows the blackbody trajectory as a black line labelled with temperature in Kelvin. This chromaticity diagram, constructed using a corrected version of John Walker's cietoppm utility, is the same as shown on the Where's purple? page.

The blackbody colours in the colour chart at top and in the diagram at right were computed by integrating the monochromatic tristimuli X, Y, Z from the CIE 2° tables over a Planck distribution. The resulting blackbody tristimuli were transformed to R, G, B, then gamma-corrected to R¢, G¢, B¢, as described on the Where's purple? page.

Blackbody colours at temperatures around 5000-7000 K are nearly white, and the choice of white point is important if one wants to render these colours accurately. On these pages I have adopted CIE D65 as white, but of course this may not accurately represent the white point R = G = B of your monitor.

Introduced by CIE in 1963, the D series of standard illuminants are intended to represent `daylight' at various correlated colour temperatures, with D65 to be used whenever possible. The precise (slightly complicated) definition of these illuminants can be found in R. W. G. Hunt (1987) ``Measuring Colour''. The `correlated colour temperature' is the temperature of the blackbody that is, in a certain well-defined sense, nearest in colour. The subscript 65 on D65 signifies a correlated colour temperature that was originally 6500 K, but thanks to a revision of the combination hc/k of fundamental constants in the Planck formula is now defined to be (1.4388/1.4380) 6500 K » 6504 K (the latest NIST value is hc/k = 1/0.6950387 cm K = 1.438769 cm K, but apparently the definition of correlated colour temperature has not been revised again).

Sun
The Sun has an effective surface temperature of 5780 K. However, the Sun's spectrum is not a precise blackbody. The graph at right shows the spectrum of the Sun as seen from above the Earth's atmosphere, together with the spectrum of a blackbody at 5780 K with the same total flux as the Sun, and the spectrum of CIE D65 `daylight' normalized to the solar flux at 560 nm. The Sun's spectrum was taken from R. L. Kurucz, I. Furenlid, J. Brault & L. Testerman (1984) Solar Flux Atlas from 296 to 1300 nm. The spectrum in the Solar Flux Atlas has a resolution of l/Dl » 800,000. The spectrum plotted at right is heavily binned, into 5 nm bins. A table of the spectral energy distribution of CIE D65 is available at the UCSD Color and Vision database.
x y
D65 0.3127 0.3290
Sun 0.3233 0.3326
5780 K 0.3264 0.3357
The table at left gives the chromaticities of the Sun and of a blackbody at 5780 K, along with the chromaticity of D65. The chromaticities were computed in the usual way by integrating the monochromatic tristimuli X, Y, Z from the CIE 2° tables over the corresponding spectrum. Each entry is correctly coloured relative to the D65 white point.

The colour of the background of this page and accompanying pages on this site is the colour of the Sun relative to D65 white. As shown in the table, the Sun's colour is in fact rather similar to that of a 5780 K blackbody. It looks peach pinkish, not yellow, doesn't it? Strange. But I think it's a pretty colour.

It has to be emphasized that white is a relative thing, at least to a certain extent. It is relative to the D65 white that the Sun is peachy pink. Item 16 of the Color FAQ states that for most people D65 has a little hint of blue. So maybe the Sun is really white?

Source: http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/colour/Tspectrum.html

Answer 4

According to Wikipedia

The Sun has a spectral class of G2V. "G2" means that it has a surface temperature of approximately 5,500 K, giving it a white color, which because of atmospheric scattering appears yellow.

Answer 5

Through human eyes a yellow main sequence star

Answer 6

I changes coloors all the time it could be red orange or yellow

Answer 7

white - it emits light of all colors

Answer 8

its very yellow. seriously. its yellow. lol