Color the universe drab beige, but color scientists’ faces red

By Paul Recer

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Whoops! Call the painter back. The color of the universe is not the pale green that astronomers said. Instead, it’s a rather ordinary beige.

Two Johns Hopkins University astronomers announced in January that they had averaged all colors from the light of 200,000 galaxies and concluded that if the human could see this combined hue, it would be a sprightly pale green. That, they said, was the color of the universe.

But Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry said Thursday that their January conclusion was tripped up by flawed software that was uncovered by color engineers who checked their data.

"It is embarrassing," Glazebrook said. "But this is science. We’re not politicians. If we make mistakes, we admit them. That’s how science works."

The effect of the software error was that the computer picked a nonstandard white and mixed it with the other colors to come up with the green. When the error was corrected and replaced with a standard white index, beige was the result, Glazebrook said.

"It looks like beige," he said. "I don’t know what else to call it. I would welcome suggestions."

In January, Baldry called the original color "cosmic spectrum green." But the pair offered no fancy name for the new beige hue.

To find this average color, Glazebrook and Baldry gathered light from galaxies out to several billion light years. They processed the light to break it into the various colors — similar to the way a prism turns sunlight into a rainbow. They averaged the color values for all the light and converted it to the primary color scale seen by the human eye.