Why is the Galaxy purple?
While the hot X-ray emissions detected by Chandra are shown in purple, the image also combines visible light captured by the Hubble Space Telescope shown in red, green and blue. The purple areas that appear fuzzy are thought to be superheated gas left over from supernova explosions of giant stars.
If we add up all the light coming from galaxies (and the stars within them), and from all the clouds of gas and dust in the Universe, we'd end up with a colour very close to white, but actually a little bit 'beige'.
Because space is a near-perfect vacuum — meaning it has exceedingly few particles — there's virtually nothing in the space between stars and planets to scatter light to our eyes. And with no light reaching the eyes, they see black.
Space emits many wavelengths of light - including a lot of blue and red light that our human eyes can see - but also ultraviolet light, gamma rays, and X-rays, which remain invisible to us.
Because purple is so strongly associated with royalty, people often perceive it as being a very regal color. These associations with royalty, as well as wealth, stem from the fact that the purple dye used in ancient times was very rare and extremely expensive.
To the eye, the Milky Way looks pale gray. A true-color photo shows that the Milky Way's spiral arms, which form most of the parts we see, are pale blue-white, and that the galaxy's central bulge in the Sagittarius region is pale yellowish. This is what you would see if your color vision worked in dim light.
This leaves only high-energy blue light to be reflected from our maroon veins. So, if you cut yourself in space, your blood would be a dark-red, maroon color.
A succession of astronauts have described the smell as '… a rather pleasant metallic sensation ... [like] ... sweet-smelling welding fumes', 'burning metal', 'a distinct odour of ozone, an acrid smell', 'walnuts and brake pads', 'gunpowder' and even 'burnt almond cookie'.
The earliest life on Earth might have been just as purple as it is green today, a scientist claims. Ancient microbes might have used a molecule other than chlorophyll to harness the Sun's rays, one that gave the organisms a violet hue.
In space or on the Moon there is no atmosphere to scatter light. The light from the sun travels a straight line without scattering and all the colors stay together.
Why do you not see stars in space?
The answer: The stars are there, they're just too faint to show up.
Space is very, very cold. The baseline temperature of outer space is 2.7 kelvins (opens in new tab) — minus 454.81 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 270.45 degrees Celsius — meaning it is barely above absolute zero, the point at which molecular motion stops.
Summary. Stars exist in a range of colors: red, orange, yellow, green, white and blue with red being the coolest and blue being the hottest.
Red-green and yellow-blue are the so-called "forbidden colors." Composed of pairs of hues whose light frequencies automatically cancel each other out in the human eye, they're supposed to be impossible to see simultaneously.
There's a limit to how much of the universe we can see. The observable universe is finite in that it hasn't existed forever. It extends 46 billion light years in every direction from us. (While our universe is 13.8 billion years old, the observable universe reaches further since the universe is expanding).
To make the first purple shades, dye-makers had to crush the shells of a species of sea snail, extract its purple mucus and then expose it to the sun for a specific period. The process made the colour so scarce and expensive that wearing it was a symbol of status and wealth.
As you can expect, purple is overwhelmingly one of the most villainous colors when it comes to Disney. When you consider that purple is often associated with power, nobility, luxury and ambition, it makes sense that we can find this color wrapped around most of these cartoon baddies.
The most refracted colour when light passes through a prism, purple is at the far end of the visible colour spectrum, and is the hardest colour for the eye to discriminate.
Universe's first-ever colour was an orange-white glow: Study. A new study has claimed that the universe's first-ever colour was an orange-white glow that originated as blackbody radiation. The study states that right after the Big Bang occurred temperatures were so high that light didn't exist.
In 2002, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry determined that the average color of the universe was a greenish white, but they soon corrected their analysis in a 2003 paper in which they reported that their survey of the light from over 200,000 galaxies averaged to a slightly beigeish white.
How many colors exist in the universe?
It all sort of depends on what exactly you mean by “infinite.” It has been determined by people who determine such things that there are somewhere around 18 decillion varieties of colors available for your viewing enjoyment. That's an 18 followed by 33 zeros.
However, as astronaut Chris Hadfield notes, in microgravity, "your eyes make tears but they stick as a liquid ball." In other words, astronauts technically can't cry. Sure, you can get a watery substance to come out of your eyes, but it doesn't fall like it ordinarily does on Earth.
Instead, you would face another gruesome fate first: your blood, your bile, your eyeballs –will boil furiously, since the low pressure of the vacuum massively reduces the boiling point of water. It is only then that you would freeze.
In space, blood can splatter even more than it usually does on Earth, unconstrained by gravity. Or it can pool into a kind of dome around a wound or incision, making it hard to see the actual trauma. (Fun fact: If you are bleeding more than 100 milliliters per minute, you are probably doomed.
Scientists have recently observed for the first time that, on an epigenetic level, astronauts age more slowly during long-term simulated space travel than they would have if their feet had been planted on Planet Earth.
It's also very cold in space. You'll eventually freeze solid. Depending on where you are in space, this will take 12-26 hours, but if you're close to a star, you'll be burnt to a crisp instead.
In either case, you could never get to the end of the universe or space. Scientists now consider it unlikely the universe has an end – a region where the galaxies stop or where there would be a barrier of some kind marking the end of space. But nobody knows for sure.
Ancient oceans in Australia's north were toxic seas of sulfur, supporting coloured bacteria that made the seas appear purple and unlike anything we know of in the Earth's history, according to new ANU research.
“Pluto is shown in a rainbow of colors that distinguish the different regions on the planet. The left side of the planet is mostly blue-green with purple swirls, while the right side ranges from a vibrant yellow-green at the top to a reddish orange toward the bottom,” Nasa posted.
Named GJ 504b, the planet is made of pink gas. It's similar to Jupiter, a giant gas planet in our own solar system. But GJ 504b is four times more massive. At 460°F, it's the temperature of a hot oven, and it's the planet's intense heat that causes it to glow.
Why is there no sound in space?
Space Environment
So, in order for sound to travel, there has to be something with molecules for it to travel through. On Earth, sound travels to your ears by vibrating air molecules. In deep space, the large empty areas between stars and planets, there are no molecules to vibrate. There is no sound there.
The earth is rotating at a tilted axis relative to the sun, and during the summer months, the North Pole is angled towards our star. That's why, for several weeks, the sun never sets above the Arctic Circle.
The Sun does indeed generate sound, in the form of pressure waves. These are produced by huge pockets of hot gas that rise from deep within the Sun, travelling at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour to eventually break through the solar surface.
No, there isn't sound in space.
This is because sound travels through the vibration of particles, and space is a vacuum. On Earth, sound mainly travels to your ears by way of vibrating air molecules, but in near-empty regions of space there are no (or very, very few) particles to vibrate – so no sound.
No. While none exist to date it would be possible for a dead star to have cooled to a safe temperature. However, such objects are inherently supported by degeneracy pressure--they're very dense.
As it travels through space, the solar wind reaches speeds of over one million miles per hour. In fact, its speed is so great that "bow shocks" form whenever it is forced to flow around the planets in the solar system.
First, the good news: Your blood won't boil. On Earth, liquids boil at a lower temperature when there's less atmospheric pressure; outer space is a vacuum, with no pressure at all; hence the blood boiling idea.
(If the universe weren't expanding, then the one or two atoms per cubic centimeter encountered by the bullet in the near-vacuum of space would bring it to a standstill after 10 million light-years.)
In the beginning, there was an infinitely dense, tiny ball of matter. Then, it all went bang, giving rise to the atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies we see today. Or at least, that's what we've been told by physicists for the past several decades.
Although you can spot many colors of stars in the night sky, purple and green stars aren't seen because of the way humans perceive visible light. Stars are a multicolored bunch. There are red giants on the verge of explosions. Big blue ones that shine in the belt of the constellation Orion and other places.
What is the coldest color?
Think of the color wheel as a clock where every hour marks a new color family. Absolutely warm and cool colors can be found at 0 (red – the warmest color) and 180 (cyan – the coolest color) degrees.
The colour provides a fundamental piece of data in stellar astrophysics—the surface temperature of the star. The hottest stars are blue and the coldest are red, contrary to the use of colours in art and in our daily experience.
Legendary is a soft, gray, millennial beige with a silvery undertone. It is a perfect paint color for a living room or exterior home.
Blue is one of the rarest of colors in nature. Even the few animals and plants that appear blue don't actually contain the color. These vibrant blue organisms have developed some unique features that use the physics of light.
The human eye can only see visible light, but light comes in many other "colors"—radio, infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray—that are invisible to the naked eye.
Eventually, the entire contents of the universe will be crushed together into an impossibly tiny space – a singularity, like a reverse Big Bang. Different scientists give different estimates of when this contraction phase might begin. It could be billions of years away yet.
The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.
The observable Universe is bounded by a 'cosmic horizon', much like the horizon at sea. Just as we know there's more ocean over the horizon, we know there are more galaxies (possibly an infinite number) beyond the cosmic horizon.
The disks appear bluer because they are the site of ongoing star formation. Massive stars are very bright and very hot, which gives their light a blue color, but they also have very short lifetimes by stellar standards. ... Only the smaller, cooler stars remain giving these galaxies a red color.
It is an image of a 'purple galaxy' known as Messier 74 (M74). The galaxy is located 32 million light years away from Earth in the constellation Pisces. It is popularly known as the Phantom Galaxy.
Is the Milky Way purple?
Our galaxy is aptly named the Milky Way — it looks white, the color of fresh spring snow in the early morning, scientists now reveal. Color is a key detail of galaxies, shedding light on its history of star formation.
The Purple Earth hypothesis is an astrobiological hypothesis that photosynthetic life forms of early Earth were based on the simpler molecule retinal rather than the more complex chlorophyll, making Earth appear purple rather than green.
In 2002, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry computed the average color from all the light we see from stars and galaxies today to determine the current color of the universe. It turned out to be a pale tan similar to the color of coffee with cream. They named the color "cosmic latte."
Green and purple stars do exist. The color of stars depends on their temperatures, and they emit radiation throughout the visible spectrum. But when a star emits peak radiation at a wavelength we define as green, it also emits radiation over the rest of the spectrum.
There are three main reasons why a galaxy may appear red, researchers said. First, it may be extremely dusty. Second, it could contain many old, red stars. Or third, the galaxy may be extremely distant, in which case the expansion of the universe has stretched its light to very long (and very red) wavelengths.
The small galaxy of IC 1613, which is 2.3 million light-years away is notable for its lack of cosmic dust swirling among its scattered stars and the bright pink gas that gives it its unique color. The star cluster's unusual cleanliness for a galaxy has helped astronomers chart the Universe's grand expanse.
Green might not be the color of stars, but it is a color clearly present in and around many galaxies. There are even “green pea” galaxies out there. Hanny's Voorwerp, identified in 2011, was the first of some 20-odd objects now known to be a ...
Despite being 30 million light-years away, the Little Lion galaxy is still considered to be in our “local universe,” which includes anywhere within 1 billion light years of Earth. It's relative proximity will make it much easier to study than low-metal galaxies much farther away.
Our sky is actually purple
Purple light has higher energy, and gets scattered more than blue. But the answer to why we see blue skies isn't a matter of physics; it's an answer for physiology.
The center of our galaxy is some 30,000 light-years away. We can't see directly into it, because this region is shrouded by dust and gas clouds.
Why is purple a forbidden flag color?
There are 196 sovereign nations in the world, and, in turn, 196 national flags. But this one color is rarely seen on any of them. ArtisticPhoto/ShutterstockPurple is a color of regality. In 16th century England, Queen Elizabeth I banned anyone outside of the immediate royal family from wearing it.
Primitive microbes that used retinal to harness the sun's energy might have dominated early Earth, DasSarma said, thus tinting some of the first biological hotspots on the planet a distinctive purple color.
