Does every sun burn the same colour?

Question

I know our sun burns yellow and so do others close to us but what about other suns?

Answer 1

It mainly depends on the temperature of the star. Hot ones are blueish and cooler ones are redish. But expect for the very cool ones (the so-called brown dwarfs) they are all basically white.

Some stars have high metal contents which absorbs certain wavelengths (colors) of light, but although this is useful for astronomers it's not something that affects the way the star looks significantly.

Answer 2

No! Our sun is a star and there are many different types of stars. If you look up in the sky at night you will see some stars appear bluish and some appear orangeish.

Star colors as perceived by the human eye are typically red, orange, yellow, blue/white, and white. The color of a star correlates with the temperature and often the size of the star. Red is the coolest while white/blue is the hottest.

A common question is "why aren't there any green stars?" Most people are surprised to learn that our sun, technically, is green! All stars give off many different wavelengths of light. In visible light, different colors are different wavelengths. The sun very strongly emitts light in the green part of the spectrum, but green is in the middle of the visible spectrum (think rainbow) so it emitts the other colors on either side relatively equally and the mixture to us appears yellowish. If the sun were a "red giant" then much of it's visible light would be emitted in the red portion of the visible spectrum. On one side of red would be infrared, which we can't really see, and then on the other side is orange and the rest of the visible colors but they'd be dimmed compared to red so the result is a star that's reddish orange.

Sometimes you may see a star flickering different colors. This is just the effect of the atmosphere splitting the light spectrum of a star much like a prism but in a turbulent way.

Answer 3

Suns don't actually burn. Burning is when oxygen combines with things and gives off CO2 and water, but I know what you're getting at...

Ever notice how neon lights are red? That's because the neon in the tube is electrically "heated", and a product of this kind of heating (called ionization) is the red light we see. In a similar way, the gasses that make up a star will determine what color you see.

The sun is actually white, but it gives off alot more yellow light because of the gasses in it's atmosphere. Some stars like Betelgeuse in Orion "burn" red. It's a Red Giant. Others like Sirius in Canis Major "burn" blue. It's a Blue Supergiant. And others like our own sun, and one of the closest star to us (Alpha Centauri) "burn" yellow. The closest star to us is a tiny red star called Proxima Centauri. It's a Red Dwarf, and can barely be seen at all.

It all depends on what's in the star's atmosphere, and how hot the stuff gets.

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Added...
"Oh my god, jhstha must have never seen the SOLAR SPECTRUM"

Any elementary school child can see that sunlight passing through a prism breaks up into a spectrum of ALL COLORS. If the sunlight were entirely yellow, you would see no RED or BLUE in the spectrum, ONLY yellow. I pray that jhstha is NOT a teacher by trade, and if he is, I pray his students are bright enough to catch his mistakes. I guess I know where the "thumbs down" for helene_thygesen and I came from now.

P.S. jhstha, combustion (burning) requires molecular oxygen. Molecules don't exist in the sun because it's all plasma. Molecules require either covalent or ionic bonds. Neither of those bonds are possible in the plasma state of matter.

Answer 4

Oh my god ... I hate people who answer as if they were scientist though they don't even know the half as like as Tony did !!

Actually Suns do burn, partially. But most of the emissions results from fusion. The color we "receive" is based on how many heavy elements there are in a star (a sun) and it's size and mass and so on. We do live under a so called yellow Sun, Tony's statement we'd have a white sun, is absolute nonsense.

Betelgeuse is a red giant, that is true, its color results from a lot of heavy elements inside (no hydrogen any more, there are other, so called heavy fusions, causeing the red color),

And Rigel is indeed a blue giant, a so called super giant, extremely hot (burns as bright as about 40.000 of our suns, very hard to imagine such a bright light from nearby, even if we lived as far away as Jupiter, if our sun was that bright, we'd be blinded)
The blue color results from the heat (think of welders and the color of the light when they are welding, it isn't really white .. it's a very very bright blue, comparable to a blue supergiant.

Answer 5

not at all. the hottest stars are blue. slightly colder ones are white. a bit colder still and you get to yellow. then comes red.

interesting enough the colour temperature as defined by physics (the hotter, the shorter the wavelength, the bluer the colour, and the cooler, the longer the wavelength, the redder the colour), is the exact opposite of how the colour spectrum is defined in art, where bluer colours are called "cold colours", and redder ones, "warm colours". FUnny

hope this helps

a

Answer 6

Aside from going into what burning is and fusion and the differences etc etc I feel I should actually answer your question.
Take a look at the following site. It is showing the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. The diagram classifies all known types of stars.

Answer 7

other suns burn at different colors... like rainbow or something like that! ^_^

Answer 8

ya