The effective temperature of the Sun is 5778 Kelvin. Using Wien’s law, one finds a peak emission per nanometer (of wavelength) at a wavelength of about 500 nm, in the green portion of the spectrum near the peak sensitivity of the human eye.
The Sun does emit a lot of cyanish green light, but the overall colour from the space is white, as it emits comparable amounts of light in the rest of the visible spectrum:
And, if talking about the colour of the sun as seen from Earth, it should be a yellowish orange (as the atmospheres filters some higher frequency light).
Another detail: blackbody radiation is an approximation. A useful one, but as seen in the graph above, at least for wavelength it peaks around blue or violet. And if you plot it by frequency instead, it should peak the closest to red (counting only visible rad).
I could’ve used purple in the example too. Dunno why I decided for green.
so the sun is purple but our eyes are flawed and therefore we see it as white when directly watching it and yellow when we look at it through the atmosphere
Mind you, regarding the sun being green, it’s worth noting this observation from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien’s_displacement_law
The effective temperature of the Sun is 5778 Kelvin. Using Wien’s law, one finds a peak emission per nanometer (of wavelength) at a wavelength of about 500 nm, in the green portion of the spectrum near the peak sensitivity of the human eye.
The Sun does emit a lot of cyanish green light, but the overall colour from the space is white, as it emits comparable amounts of light in the rest of the visible spectrum:
And, if talking about the colour of the sun as seen from Earth, it should be a yellowish orange (as the atmospheres filters some higher frequency light).
Another detail: blackbody radiation is an approximation. A useful one, but as seen in the graph above, at least for wavelength it peaks around blue or violet. And if you plot it by frequency instead, it should peak the closest to red (counting only visible rad).
I could’ve used purple in the example too. Dunno why I decided for green.
so the sun is purple but our eyes are flawed and therefore we see it as white when directly watching it and yellow when we look at it through the atmosphere