When you're little, you tend to draw a lot of Suns. An essential part of any happy landscape sketch, sometimes they're just be simple circles, sometimes they'll have great, jagged beams shooting out of them, sometimes they'll be wearing some really cool sunglasses. And depending on where you grew up, you're probably going to colour your beautiful new Sun in yellow - or maybe orange if your scene is during a sunset - or red, if you were born in Japan.
But here's the kicker - the Sun isn't any of these colours, says Joe Hanson in the latest episode of It's Okay To Be Smart. It's not really any colour, in fact, it's actually just plain old white. So why does it look so yellowy, orangey, reddish to us? As Joe explains, the blue and violet wavelengths in the sunlight are scattered away by Earth's atmosphere, which means the colour of the Sun, as we see it, is completely skewed. Now, I hate to break it to you - but those amazing images of the Sun we get from NASA? They're actually tinted orange, because that's a more familiar view of the Sun for us.
So what colour is the Universe then, if our Sun is white? Joe explains how different stars across the Universe give off different mixtures of light. We've got the cooler stars giving off red light, and the hottest stars are blue. And when scientists averaged all that colour out, you know what colour they got for the Universe? I won't spoil it for you, you're going to have to watch the episode of It's Okay To Be Smart above, but let's just say it's kinda making me hungry.