#neverknew

... Cosmic Latte!

Well, hello there, it’s Ju again :) This week, I’ve got a rather short one for you. Have you ever wondered, what the average color of the universe might be? No? Well honestly – me neither…  But please allow me to enrich your lives with some random knowledge, you’ll most certainly never ever need, but just as well cannot forget ever again ;)

So apparently, some people have figured out the answer to that particular question. A group of astronomers from John Hopkins university tried to determine it several times, actually. Using the so-called 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, the light of more than 200,000 galaxies was measured, and after lots of calculations at some point including the galaxies' wavelengths and spectra, the universes average color was found out. In case you still wonder what an „average color" is supposed to be: Imagine you put the whole universe in a small box and all its light shone out of it at the same time. The color you’d perceive would be the average color. However, in 2001 said group of astronomers figured that color to be more of a greenish-white, at first. About a year later, they had to correct their initial result and claimed it to be a rather beigeish white, which is the latest statement up to today.

Now in order to get a better image of that beigeish white color, here’s some data for you:

The colour’s hex triplet code is #FFF8E7

RGB color code: 255, 248, 231

CMYK code: 0, 2.7, 9.6, 0

ISCC-NBS-description: pale yellow-green

Alright, that’s the color, now it needs a name. When the average color of the universe was found, it was published and announced on several channels and news-outlets, which included the call to send in suggestions for a name. Several people followed that call. Some of the most successful suggestions were „Cappucino Cosmico“, „Big Bang Beige“, „Astronomer Almond“, „Univeige“ or „Skyvory“. Still, the winner was a different name (as you might have guessed). The researcher's favorite was „Cosmic Latte“. They loved its resemblance with the Milky Way’s name – the „Via Lattea“ if put in its discoverer Galileo Galilei’s native language.

I didn’t know about that whole topic either, at least until recently. But once I learned about it, as an astronomy class veteran, semi-professional stargazer and lover of certain space-associated movies, I found myself quite fascinated and decided, that I want to share that with you :)