what do scientists mean the colour of the universe is beige?

Question

Forgive my ignorance but looking up at night it looks almost black - am I missing something?

thank you people for fantastic answers! It makes sense to me now.

Answer 1

The article cited below says "The Universe is not turquoise - it's beige"!

In a team headed by Ivan Baldry and Karl Glazebrook at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland, they determined the cosmic colour by combining light from over 200,000 galaxies within two billion light years of Earth.

The data came from the Australian 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in New South Wales, Australia.

In the article, Glazebrook now says "the true colour this data gives is closer to beige."

Hope this helps

By the way, I agree with you - I think it looks pretty black!

Answer 2

The black you see is empty space. That's not very interesting to anybody.

Instead, what some astronomers did was add together all the frequencies of all the light in the universe. So the 'beige' color is what you would see if all the light was in the same place... of course, with all that light you wouldn't see any black, either!

Curiously, instead of just calling it 'beige', they decided to name that exact frequency. It is now called 'Cosmic Latte'. Seriously. Wacky scientists.

Answer 3

Basically, the color of the Universe can be defined as the color the human eye would see if all the optical light in the Universe today were combined. In other words, if you moved all the optical light that exists in the Universe today to one nearby stationary box, you would see this box as having the color of the Universe.

It's called the cosmic spectrum and It was not until recently that a study has been able to emulate this and you can read about it here:
http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~kgb/cosspec/

It actually ends up being closer to white than beige, but it is a close approximation.

Answer 4

I haven't heard that but they probably mean that large amounts of hydrogen and some helium which make up the vast majority of all the molecules in our universe would look beige (which makes some sense since the many nuclear reactors that are the stars "burn" off-white/yellow). Of course all of this matter is spread out over a large area so you mostly see the dark gaps in-between.

Answer 5

ACCTUALLY IT WAS A MISTAKE HAHAHAHAH. AT LEAST THEY ADMITTERD TO IT.The effect of the software error was that the computer picked a non-standard white and mixed it with the other colours to come up with the turquoise. When the error was corrected and replaced with a standard white index, beige was the result, Mr Glazebrook said.

"It looks like beige," he said. "I don’t know what else to call it. I would welcome suggestions."

In January, Mr Baldry called the turquoise "cosmic spectrum green". But the pair offered no fancy name for the new, rather dull beige hue

BUT TO BE PRECICE ITS GAMMA III E ( i think) lol

Answer 6

They are speaking of the "average color". While space looks black there is lots of stuff in it that is not. When you take all of the stuff we can see and "smear it out" the resulting color is sort of beige.

Answer 7

they are probably referring to all the matter in the universe - not the empty space.

Answer 8

B- black
E- enigmatic
I - infinite
G - god-made
E- expanding

dat is wot dey mean by B.E.I.G.E. ;-)