Cosmic Latte

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

With Apologies to van Gogh

Scientists and artists seem to follow parallel paths in their curiosity and study of the world (and universe) around them. We both explore and test ideas to discover if there is something new. However, we often diverge in our interpretations of things. Scientists must stick to provable facts. We artists interpret and freely create. The following discovery is clearly one of those places where our perspectives may diverge.

How do you find the color of the Universe? Johns Hopkins astronomers Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry measured the color of the light emitted from more than 200,000 galaxies in order to construct a cosmic spectrum, a graph of the energy emitted in the Universe for different wavelengths of light. The survey reached out several billion light years.

They determined the average color to be that which “an observer would see if they had the Universe in a box, and could see all the light at once. . .” correctin…