The question whether or not the sun is yellow or white has sparked a discussion on Twitter.
The argument began when author Jacqui Deevoy posted this past week that the spherical, yellow sun from her childhood abruptly turned white and appeared crooked.
"I’m just telling a person in their 20s that the sun used to be yellow when I was a child and he’s laughing. The last time he saw a yellow sun was on Teletubbies. Here’s the sun right now. White and a weird shape. How’s it looking where you are?", Jacqui Deevoy posted on Twitter on May 3, 2023.
Watch:
I’m just telling a person in their 20s that the sun used to be yellow when I was a child and he’s laughing. The last time he saw a yellow sun was on Teletubbies. Here’s the sun right now. White and a weird shape. How’s it looking where you are? pic.twitter.com/C3BJdt7s8I
— Jacqui Deevoy (@JacquiDeevoy1) May 3, 2023
Within a few days the post garnered over six million views and a huge debate started over the actual colour of Sun. The Twitter split in two parts, one part supporting that the sun was yellow before and then turned white. Meanwhile, another faction wrote that it was always white.
The Sun, according to the scientists, possesses a small amount of each, but neither one is its colour. In reality, the sun is green.
Project scientist of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory W Dean Pesnell said, as quoted by WION, “The sun would appear green if your eye could handle looking at it.”
“Basically, when you look at the sun, it has enough of all the different colours in it and it’s so bright that everybody’s eyes are firing like crazy and saying, ‘It’s too bright for me to tell you what colour it is.’ That’s why the sun looks white to us,” he added.
"Essentially, it’s a green star that looks white because it’s too bright, and it can also appear yellow, orange or red because of how our atmosphere works,” Pesnell said, "What we perceive as the sun’s hue is really light bouncing off surfaces. When it comes to stars, colour equals temperature,” said Pesnell.
"With a temperature that hit 27 million degrees Fahrenheit in the sun's core, the star is “somewhere in the middle, in this weird space where we can’t perceive its colour,” Pesnell added.
“The sun is at its midlife, and it still has quite a lot of years before it changes colours. It still hasn’t dimmed out one bit,” Pesnell stated.
