What color is the sun? No one on Twitter has gotten the answer right

Madison Selcho
·2 min read
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This image captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on June 20, 2013, shows the bright light of a solar flare on the left side of the sun.
This image captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on June 20, 2013, shows the bright light of a solar flare on the left side of the sun. | NASA/SDO

Twitter users have taken to the platform recently to debate what color the sun actually is.

Though most people have claimed that it is either white or yellow, NASA says it is actually a blue-green color.

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How did the debate start? A Twitter user kicked off the debate by posting a picture they took of the sun, along with the caption, “I’m just telling a person in their 20s that the sun used to be yellow when I was a child and he’s laughing. The last time he saw a yellow sun was on Teletubbies. Here’s the sun right now. White and a weird shape. How’s it looking where you are?

The Washington Post reported that over a few days the post gained over 6 million views and people debated the color of the sun in the comment section, with most people claiming they see the sun as yellow or white.

Despite the debate on social media and what our eyes have been telling us, science says the sun is actually green.

The sun appears different depending on who’s looking. From left, NASA’s NuSTAR sees high-energy X-rays; the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hinode mission sees lower energy X-rays; and NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory sees ultraviolet light. | NASA/JPL-Caltech/JAXA
The sun appears different depending on who’s looking. From left, NASA’s NuSTAR sees high-energy X-rays; the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hinode mission sees lower energy X-rays; and NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory sees ultraviolet light. | NASA/JPL-Caltech/JAXA

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Is the sun actually green? The Washington Post reported that our eyes cannot handle seeing the actual color of the sun, which is green, so we see the sun as yellow or white.

“The sun would appear green if your eye could handle looking at it,” project scientist of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, W. Dean Pesnell, said. “Basically, when you look at the sun, it has enough of all the different colors in it and it’s so bright that everybody’s eyes are firing like crazy and saying, ‘It’s too bright for me to tell you what color it is.’ That’s why the sun looks white to us.”

The sun reportedly has a little bit of yellow and white, but its real color is green.

“When you calculate the sun’s wavelength or visible light, it emits energy around 500 nm, which is close to blue-green on the visible light spectrum,” according to Action News 5.