IN JANUARY, astronomers declared the true colour of the Universe was somewhere between pale turquoise and aquamarine. Ivan Baldry and Karl Glazebrook of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore worked out the cosmic colour by combining light from over 200,000 galaxies.
Although the spectrum is correct, Glazebrook now says the true colour is closer to beige. “I’m very embarrassed,” he says. The mistake was caused by a bug in the software used to convert the cosmic spectrum into the colour we would see.
