*Note:* You won't find colors like brown or grey on the chromaticity graph in this video because it's only a 2D slice of the _actual_ graph. Actual chromaticity requires a third axis, a lightness/darkness axis, to show the darker versions of colors. Brown is dark orange, grey is dark white, etc.
So, how does the "star color curve" vary in the 3-D chromaticity graph? Is it the same or do we get to see dimmer versions of stars too? Awesome video by the way.
So brown dwarf stars are actually orange with a low intensity. Then also that curve you embedded in this 2d slice of "all" perceptible colors, it must be only a 1d slice of some 2d surface that is derived form the spectrum emitted by a particular star.
I'll be the nerd clone today: I think that you oversimplified when you said we have red, green and blue color receptors, it's actually red, yellow and blue (although of course they see a range and only peak their sensibility in those frequencies), RGB is a convenient color generation using light but not what we see, and that's probably why we discern better the differences in the yellow-red narrow range than in the green-blue wider one. Edit: I was wrong: the actual peak frequencies of the three receptors (cones) are typically purple, green (or teal) and yellow. It's the yellow receptor which mostly allows us to discern red too.
So in theory: if you filtered out the red and blue from an entire star in a giant Dyson sphere. You would form the most obvious “lighthouse” to other life in the galaxy... a green star?
I don't think so because aliens may see light in an entirely different way. There are not green stars, in part, because of the way humans interpret light. The chromaticity diagram is for humans, other animals and insects have different diagrams. They might experience something like a green star.
You learn this in College, specifically Physics and Astronomy related courses. However I definitely didn't learn this in high school, as I barely did anything with Logs in High School so calculating this would have been hard. But this guy did just prove that you can explain the concept to someone who doesn't know the underlying math.
@@Anankin12 Yeah you can explain the concept to someone but unless they have the math background good luck trying to show the proof / how the theory actually works the moment Calculus or Linear Algebre get involved xD
Congrats on the sliding emission curve with higher surface temperatures through the visible spectrum, it makes things more ... eh ... 'visible'. Thanks to include also the link to human vision spectral sensitivity.
The comprehensive recap at the end was a nice touch. Temperature is such an interesting concept, and many things that seem mysterious suddenly make sense when the distribution of kinetic energy is considered.
you're simply amazing, I've finally understood the monochromatic curve and the chromaticity graph thanks to your creative way of explaining stuff. Thank you
this was easily the best explaination anyone has given on this subject, i havent heard anyone else make it so easy to understand and grasp. very nice i like the video
Math has the opposite problem -- so many of the names sound pretty cool, but are actually misleading. e.g. "Imaginary" numbers are no more or less imaginary than "real" numbers.
Nick, great job adding the 20-second summary at the end. This is an improvement on your normal way of structuring scripts, not REALLY reaching a conclusion (because physics doesn't generally allow for cleanly-delimited conclusions, and I like that you don't pretend that it does), just reaching the end of what you're going to explain, and then going straight into "So, what do you think..." . The summary wrap-up statement wouldn't be nearly as necessary if you were just doing the regular surface-level explanations that most other science channels do, but since you're ACTUALLY trying to get people to develop new heuristics in most of your videos, and not just put a check in a box for "well, yep, I did a video about that", the summary is a great way to put a bow on things.
If you look at the sun in space outside of the vast majority of the Earth's atmosphere, you would see it as white. (Then you would regret that you weren't wearing super shielding sun glasses because now you have irreversible eye damage because the sun burned a hole in the center of your retina going through your entire eyeball.)
If you look at a rainbow or through a prism, you can see the separated colors from the sun and judge for yourself. Too bad our eyes aren't sensitive enough to see the rainbows from the stars.
Between Science Asylum, PBS spacetime and Fermilab, I've learned more than I ever did in school, but most of my teachers would have taught like this if they weren't constrained by the school rules and curriculum and they sometimes did when they could. So i'm hoping these channels are around when my kids grow up so I can show them. Great channel, keep up the great work, Nick.
I'm a teacher, and I'm always so grateful to hear that someone from outside the profession understands that there are chains that the system shackles us with that are stronger than we are, no matter how hard we fight - and please believe, we never stop fighting for our students!
You can only teach so much at school. If you want to learn literally everyhing there is or more than that go in depth to understand the stuff and not just learn "facts" and simple concepts, you can do that in your free time or go to University and learn the subject that interests you. Even at University you eventually specialize in something after learning some general foundation. And let me tell you, even most university students bitch about why they have to learn stuff that they'll never use. Many students bitch why they have to take Math, when all they want to do later is e.g. become a biologist. Don't pretend like you want to learn everyhing. You might be interested in science, but others are not. You might like to learn more about atoms, while others would rather learn more about fashion. The goal of school is to give you a foundation to expand on, that allows you to learn for yourself. If you are more interested in something and want to go more in depth, that what University is for. Be honest, if the school would not force you to take certain subjects, you wouldn't bother learning about them. You might that stuff, but it is part of a general education. Others hate it that they have to take science classes. You have no clue how much stuff there is that you could learn. Most students are already sick of the stuff that is taught in school. You can't expect school to teach you everything, nor would you want school to teach you everything. Be honest, most of the stuff you'd find boring. And even if you didn't find something boring, you might be overwhelmed by it. If you think school doesn't teach you alot and it is too easy, you can just jump classes any time you want. Get your highschool diploma at age 14 or younger and move on to college.
@@maythesciencebewithyou No, every university force you to learn so leftist ideology, like gender studies 101. While what you said may be right 20 years ago. IT is not like that even in BASIC bachelor degree course, after all.
Same is true for metal heating in blacksmithing. Though past white hot glow it often melts! You can catch more color in the metal at lower temps, but turquoise is as close to green as I have seen in temper colors.
Magnificent video Nick. You are constantly wanting to explain every single detail of every physical phenomena to make it less abstract and accessible for many people. And this is rare in education, thats why i admire your work A LOT
There’s a lot of things that blow my mind, but this really blew my mind. I love light and color science, it’s a much deeper rabbit hole than I ever expected. I need more!
Pretty neat explanation of what happens with the mixture of colored light. I set up and executed professional outdoor aerial pyrotechnics displays for 20 years and during a finale, if I sent many multicolor shells, the resulting effect in the sky would be clusters of white with colors at the edges. I never knew what to call it but would say the colors wash out to white.
@@thomasraahauge5231 Being less massive than it needs to be to reach self sustained fusion and having the maximum peak in infrared radiation. So it is really dark red.
I think it would be neat to see purple and green stars. I made some in Photoshop a few years back. They're a bit crude, but, kinda cool to look at. This was also done under the assumption that stars came in every color at the time.
Not only are you a brilliant teacher and mentor, you're also very good at pausing between your sentences. When I watch other youtube channels, they squeeze everything they say into one very long nonstop sentence and give no pausing in between. This overwhelms my brain and thinking and I have to manually pause the video every so often. But you (among others) make a brief pause between your remarks and it allows my mind to absorb what I'm hearing. It makes good communication and your videos very enjoyable to watch, and I actually learn from them. With the others that don't make brief pauses, I get headaches and I never want to watch them again.
*"They squeeze everything they say into one very long nonstop sentence and give no pausing in between."* To be fair, I did this too in my really early videos, but eventually realized that wasn't helpful.
Why violet is on the edge while it's after the limit of our blue sensor? It cannot be a mixed color from other green and red senors since more violet means less green and red response (it's not a monochromatic color). In RGB code violet corresponds to a blue with some red, but violet should be a dark blue according the eye cone cells response. In HSL code the hue is a loop, blue and red are smoothly connected with the violet. I really want to understand!
The red sensor actually has a second bump/sensitivity on the violet end of the visible spectrum. It doesn't get talked about much because it's smaller than the main peak, but it's there.
@@ScienceAsylum : I discussed with a PhD specialized in light and laser and he has another explanation. The bump exists but it's very small and it might be the absorption curve and not the real sensibility response curve. The answer might be that purple color sensation is the real response of the "blue" cone, but when the blue cone is at its max response, the green et red cones are also existed to give the blue sensation. This happen especially with the blue cone because its response is far from other cones and it can be excited alone (purple at 400nm). It would be interesting to get the color of each cones taken separately, that's not the RGB primary color we use. For some reason a mix of blue and red gives the purple/magenta color so that a screen can reproduce all colors of the chromacity triangle. Can I have your opinion?
@@ScienceAsylum That's a common misconception. Unfortunately, that graph with the red bump in violet-blue is actually from a color matching graph, and not the actual cone sensitivity graphs. The reason violet appears to contain red still eludes me to this day! I've searched online for an answer, and I'm not sure there is an absolute known answer.
Wow, now I know where the temperature color of the light bulbs comes from. That's why I love 6000K bulbs. They are white and not yellow like the 3000K ones.
@Science Asylum Thank you for doing a video including color theory. It's one of my favorite things! Also, thank you for saying the sun is white. As a color science enthusiast, it's infuriating hearing people claim the sun is yellow. It's only yellow when it's very low in the sky.
Nick you are simply the best. I have heard and read dozens of explanations on the subject but never so clear, precise and complete. At the end of the lesson can only say: of course it is! Thank you Big Crazy
Mr Lucid: "What did you expect?" Mr Einstein: "I have deep faith that the principle of the universe will be beautiful and simple." Mr Lucid: "The universe to be simple!? Pff!" :D
Emergent behavior is awesome and/or headache inducing. The basic principles don't have to be complicated for the universe to be an incomprehensible mess.
The world needs to make lots of clones of you so that you can be *everybody's* science or physics teacher. With you teaching science and 3blue1brown teaching math, school would be a WHOLE lot more enjoyable and understandable. Thanks for what you do.
Thank you, but a few nitpicks: 1) It is the photosphere of a star that emits visible light, not its chromosphere. 2) The Sun's blackbody curve peaks in the blue-green part of the spectrum. But because of the shape of the blackbody curve, with its long slope on the right (red) side, the Sun still emits about equal amounts of red and blue light even though its blackbody curve peaks in the blue-green part of the spectrum. Like you said, equal amounts of red and blue light (and yellow and green) equals white light. Thank you for stating clearly that the Sun is white!!!
3:22 According to that graph, our brain never gets only signals from the green receptors. Now I wonder how the brain would interpret it if we could somehow either directly stimulate the "green" nerves or suppress the other two.
@@frogz You mean looking directly into the laser to burn out the receptors for that color? I don't know if the damage of the laser is selective like that. If it is, it's still a very drastic measure. I'd prefer a non permanent suppression of receptors.
@Matthew H Yep, especially cyan. On older screens, cyan looks like light blue. Real cyan is much richer than that! It looks like a beautiful mix of blue and green. It's unfortunate that we're robbed of such a gorgeous color by our inadequate screens.
@@ewthmatth Look up screens with a wide color gamut. What kind of phone do you have? Newer phones are starting to have wider gamuts. My phone, for example, shows cyan much better than my old phone, but it's still not as good as real spectral cyan.
I haven't seen a video like this on RU-vid. Thanks for the very clear and will presented explanation! I always wondered about this exact question. I just never really looked into it! Glad to know now :) Edit: why was I not already subscribed? Gonna be binging your videos soon haha
Im no expert but I think youre looking from the wrong perspective. In our Time scale the two objects are still moving. And as such they can do all the stuff they want to. Like spinning, deforming, and merging. (Seriously with the infinite time dilatation thing they couldnt even do that properly, because they move to the middle of the black hole faster than the speed of light. This just dont work - as far as we know.) In the end its a singularity and we dont know whats physically inside a black hole. All the space and time switchting inside a black hole is just because our mathematics from outside a black hole say so. We dont know if there are other factors for the formulas and how they look like.
The same reason a photon, which experiences no "subjective" time nor space at all (infinite time dilation as well), interacts with electrons and such, including our eyes, in less dilated space-time? I don't understand how exactly either but I think I understand it is much more common and general than black holes only.
Because the event horizon is just a bounds. It's vaguely true that within a black hole you'd experience no time, but that's a different situation than the bounds of the black hole. From within, you would never experience the collision because the collision never reaches you. The collision DOES reach the bounds, though, which is the event horizon. If you were in the black hole, you'd experience the collision after an infinite amount of time, but that's only true from within. Einstein said that there's no preferential reference frame, so it's all about what the observer sees.
@@linksfood The thing is, from our perspective, nothing ever crosses event horizon in the first place. That's why it's called an event horizon. Those events never take place in... uhm... our universe. I'm no expert (far from it), but if that's the case, how the two bounds of never happening stuff can even merge? How can it suck matter (or energy, and yes, I'm aware it doesn't suck really) if that matter (or energy) never enters the black hole from our point of view. Instead of my pathetic rumbling, better check this video ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vNaEBbFbvcY.html But a video on the topic would be a blast.
Great video as always. I thought I'll just learn about stars, but ended up learning about visible spectrum, black body radiation and other cool stuffs. Superb video.
Thank you thank you! I had no idea and now I completely understand! Those color graphs as well as your explanation of the black body curve make total sense and have inspired me to learn more! Your channel rocks! I think I hit thums up more times on your channel than anything else I watch on RU-vid!
2:13 because curve is for perfectly ideal black body(which is body that emits or absorb all wavelengths of light. ) That is what i been taught at before college/university.😁❤️
What if you had a cool star that had an extremely high amount of something like copper which emits light in a very specific wavelength? Would that shift the colour of the star far enough off the temperature curve to to visibly change its colour? Or would the blackbody radiation still be brighter than whatever emission lines the dominant element produced? Also, this would probably indicate that someone had artificially created a particularly heavy star for some reason (maybe they just wanted to try it out for a youtube video).
RGB means we identify the mix of additive light colors needed to generate the color in question. CMYK means we identify the mix of pigments, which are subtractive because pigments absorb color.
3:22 the more technical term is short, medium, and long receptors, the actual color is mixed later in ganglia and that’s where you get opponent processes wherein fatiguing the color blue makes you see more yellow.
Looking at the retina cone color distribution curves made me realize you can see pure red or pure blue/indigo, but you can never actually see pure green. Any wavelength of light that is detectable by your green cones will also trigger your blue or red cones in some amount because of the 100% overlap for that cone type.
I wish our eyes could pick out individual colors. Then we could appreciate how beautiful things really are. Thanks for making this video. A simple yet elegant explanation.
Very informative! I Subscribed~ I remember playing Star Control II and learning what star colours went from coldest to hottest, but I don't remember what the order was and if that was factual.
Thank you so much for this useful video! It also answers my long time question why our Sun doesn't look yellow though it is a Type G (yellow) star. Thanks again!
