Repainting the cosmic palette

After all the hue and cry about the color of the universe, astronomers have now revised their findings. It’s not pale green but boring old beige.

In a whimsical calculation that received wide publicity last January, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan K. Baldry of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore estimated the average color of the cosmos: the hue that the human eye would perceive if all the light from nearby galaxies was blended into a single point of light (SN: 1/26/02, p.