If every source of light in the night sky were a bucket of paint and you blended them onto a canvas, what colour would you see? Subscribe now for unlimited access . Login or signup to continue reading All articles from our website The digital version of Today's Paper Breaking news alerts direct to your inbox All articles from the other regional websites in your area Continue This is approximately what researchers did in 2002 when they averaged the light of more than 200,000 galaxies. Initially, they calculated that it was a greenish white, but they then concluded it is in fact beige white.
Giving it a catchy name, they called it Cosmic Latte (if you want to recreate this in your paint program, the hex value is #FFF8E7). Measuring the cosmic spectrum was actually not the goal of their study - they were more interested in studying the formation of stars. They looked at the dark lines in spectral images to measure the age of galaxies and star systems.
Stars were brighter in the past and their colour changes gradually over time. Picture Shutterstock This allowed them to build a kind of population census, profiled according to age. They were able to do this because stars were brighter in the past and their colour changes gradually over time.
Blue shifts towards red, while more blue stars become more yellow, which eventually become red giants. Because the researchers wanted the colours to be as they were originally emitted, they had to compensate for the blue shift that occurs as s.