When drawing the Sun in a typical landscape, the first color you instinctively notice is “yellow”. Professional photographers may see the Sun as “blue”, but for most people, the Sun is definitely “yellow”. However, the astrophysicist calls it a “conspiracy of astrophysical laws and human physiology.” The color that human eyes see in the sun is an illusion created by the laws of spectroscopy that deal with the absorption and emission of light. The biology of human vision leads them to perceive the Sun as “yellow” or “blue”, while in reality it is “white”. In a short passage, he explained how the science of light projects this wonderful illusion on the planets that no one but those with a telescope could penetrate. “People say the Sun is yellow,” he says in the SXSW clip. “No, it’s not. It’s white.” In a StarTalk video, he elaborated on this statement with the example of a red colored gel. When white light shines on a sheet of white paper, it shows the paper as it’s white What if someone spreads a layer of red gel in front of a white light? The paper looked red, exactly. So, according to the American Star, if the Sun was “yellow”, then in the middle of the day, the snow would look “yellow”. But it is not so. So the first thing is that the sun is not “yellow”. The next question that arises is: why is it not obvious? The secret of this lies in human biology. Humans normally perceive colors with a biological mechanism that works behind their eyes at the heart. Inside each eye, there is a paper-thin optic nerve called the retina that receives light from the sensory eye, explains TED-Ed. Inside the retina, billions of photoreceptor cells help receive light. These photoreceptor cells are of two types: rods and cones.
While the rods are all designed to perceive light in the dark, which comes in a range of gray-black-white, the cones are designed to see color. Humans normally perceive colors with a biological mechanism that works behind their eyes at the heart. Inside each eye, there is a paper-thin optic nerve called the retina that receives light from the sensory eye, explains TED-Ed. Inside the retina, billions of photoreceptor cells help receive light.
These photoreceptor cells are of two types: rods and cones. While rods are all designed to perceive light in the dark, which comes in a range of gray-black-white, cones are designed to see colors.This is what happens when people observe cosmic objects and interstellar stars. “When the sun goes down, its light is greatly attenuated by the dust in the atmosphere,” he explains in the SXSW video. “These particles in the air spread the blue light from the sun in the rest of the sky, making the sky blue. And the more blue they remove, the more yellow-red the Sun appears.”
