Learn what color the Sun is and why it appears different colors from Space, the Earth, and in photographs. Here are all the visible colors of the Sun, produced by passing the Sun's light through a prism -like device. The spectrum was created at the McMath-Pierce Solar Observatory and shows, first off, that although our white -appearing Sun emits light of nearly every color, it appears brightest in yellow.
Color, though, is how our brain interprets the full mix of light wavelengths entering our eyes. The sun's peak intensity is at a green wavelength. But green is just one of many colors of light the sun emits.
Sunlight spans the whole light spectrum. The Sun would have to emit only green light for our eyes to perceive it as green. This means the actual colour of the Sun is white.
So, why does it generally look yellow? This is because the Earth's atmosphere scatters blue light more efficiently than red light. The shorter wavelengths that make up the colours green, blue and violet get scattered more and give us the blue sky. The remaining yellow, orange and red wavelengths tend to travel straight through without getting scattered as much.
The more atmosphere sunlight passes through, the more red it appears. That's why we have red sunsets. The Sun is yellow, right? Turns out it's not that simple.
What colour the Sun is depends on how you observe it, and from where. The sun is white-kind of. It depends on your interpretation of color, the way colors work, the way our eyes see and, just as importantly, the air we see through.
The color of the sun is white. The sun emits all colors of the rainbow in approximately equal amounts and we call this combination "white". That is why we can see so many different colors in the natural world under the illumination of sunlight.
If sunlight were green, then everything outside would look green or would look dark. Many people imagine the sun as yellow or orange, often depicted that way in art and media. However, the sun's actual color is white when viewed from space, without Earth's atmospheric interference.
This discrepancy between its true and perceived color results from scientific principles. Understanding these phenomena clarifies why our star looks different depending on the observation point. Image courtesy ESA/NASA/SOHO Sometimes the display color of the Sun is culturally determined.
If a kindergartener in the USA colors a picture of the Sun, they will usually make it yellow. However, a kindergartener in Japan would normally color it red! In spite of these "artistic licenses", the Sun really is white!