Could be any color. But it tends towards black. Why?

It's not, depending on your definition of black.

Have you tried Googling this before posting? I guess not.

How is it not black?

aufbahrung wrote:Could be any color. But it tends towards black. Why?

Because dark colors are slimming and space doesn't want to look fat?

Sith Lords wear black. Draw your own conclusions.

aufbahrung wrote:Could be any color.

It couldn't, if you know what makes color, and if you know what most of space is lacking.

SafeAsMilk wrote:

aufbahrung wrote:Could be any color.

It couldn't, if you know what makes color, and if you know what most of space is lacking.

But, it's such a cute question. Childlike.

It's not 'out there' but in the brain. And whilst space is deep, the brain does a splendid job at making the sky look blue in the day time.

newolder wrote:How is it not black?

What I meant is that it's not devoid of EM radiation. Also that black to us is not the same as black to, for example, a bee which can see UV but not red so what may look black to us may look 'UV' to a bee and what looks red to us looks black to a bee.

"Black" is the name you give to things that don't trigger the receptors in your eye. Those receptors are triggered by EM radiation in the range of about 380 to 740 nanometers. Space doesn't emit or reflect light in those wavelengths of sufficient intensity.

I'm going to ignore the traditional equivocation between, and argument over, the "thing we perceive as black" and "the thing that causes us to perceive black", since it's (as always) present in the question rather than the answer. What we mean by "the sky is blue" or "space is black" has nothing to do with perceptions, it's about physical properties (that we can perceive).

aufbahrung wrote:It's not 'out there' but in the brain. And whilst space is deep, the brain does a splendid job at making the sky look blue in the day time.

There's actual 'blue' wavelength EM radiation (blue light) coming from the sky during daytime, it's not our brain playing tricks making something black look blue.

Black goes with everything. Pretty much everything is in space, so it makes sense.

Papa Smurf is correct. The human sense of the e-m spectrum is limited to a coverage of about 1 octave (the blue end is about twice the frequency of the red we see) and we need other instruments to observe/record the frequencies beyond. The CMBR can then be frequency shifted into our visible range and the noise amplified to produce the posted image. "Blackness" (= signal not registered) depends on the instrument/eye.

"Space" is very colourful, on a starry night filled with LSD.

Ironclad wrote:"Space" is very colourful, on a starry night filled with LSD.

Where I live (most densely populated area of the Netherlands) you're lucky to see more than a few dozen stars, many nights you don't see any stars at all:

https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/#zoo ... FFFFTFFFFF

It sucks. I've seen how beautiful the night sky can be to the naked eye, for instance in the countryside in France.

Or perhaps you meant actual LSD . But I don't do that.

Also, since I gave a sensible answer and missed out on the silliness that others were enjoying, her's my silly answer:

Space isn't black, it's transparent.

Dark matter's not red,
dark matter's not blue.
Without a U(1)dark
it'll stay that way too.

aufbahrung wrote:Could be any color. But it tends towards black. Why?

Wow.

Spearthrower wrote:

aufbahrung wrote:Could be any color. But it tends towards black. Why?

Wow.

From a recent Nobel laureate in Literature: "The sun's not yellow; it's chicken." Maybe Crumple just has a touch of those Tombstone Blues.

You could write a dissertation on it:

https://thingsiwriteforme.wordpress.com ... s-chicken/

But please, don't.