what colour is the Sun?

Take a look at this chart. It shows stars with different temperatures. The temperature of most stars is between about 3,000 °C and 40,000 °C. Our Sun appears as a yellow star because it has a surface temperature of 6,000 °C.

The Sun looks yellow because most of its light is at the wavelength where our eyes see yellow. If the Sun radiated most of its light at much shorter wavelengths for example, the Sun would look blue, like this.

At sunset or sunrise the Sun can appear very red.  This is because in that position the light is travelling a long way through the atmosphere which then absorbs a lot of the blue light and just leaves the red light to reach our eyes.

Image credit: SOHO/EIT

Here is an image of the Sun. It is an image taken in the ultraviolet wavelength range by the EIT instrument on the SOHO satellite. It's a false colour image, the detector on the satellite has captured the image data, the data has been processed and in this case coloured blue. We cannot see utraviolet radiation, so we can make the image any colour we like - blue, green, orange or even purple.

You can find out more about SOHO and other solar spacecraft by following this link.

how hot is the Sun? | how bright is the Sun?
how big is the Sun? | what's the mass of the Sun?

how old is the Sun | what is the Sun made of? | does the Sun rotate?