Milky Way white as the driven snow, scientists say

What do you suppose the Milky Way’s color is based on what you’ve seen with your eyes? If you guessed white, you’re dead on. A team of astronomers in Pitt’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences announced last … Continue reading →

The bright Milky Way crosses the summer nighttime sky. A team of scientists recently determined our galaxy's color. Photo: Bob King
What do you suppose the Milky Way’s color is based on what you’ve seen with your eyes? If you guessed white, you’re dead on. A team of astronomers in Pitt’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences announced last week the most accurate determination yet of the color of the Milky Way Galaxy: “a very pure white, almost mirroring a fresh spring snowfall.”
It seems obvious, but it’s really not easy to figure out the overall color of something you’re inside of or surrounded by. Looking out my window here in northern Minnesota, I might be tempted to call the overall color of the Earth gray, but I know better. What the team did instead was flip through the 930,000 galaxies images taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and identify those that had ...