What Is The Actual Color Of The Sun?

While the sun seems yellow to you from childhood, in reality, it is white. The reason why the sun appears yellow is because of the Earth’s atmosphere. When sunlight hits atmospheric particles, it causes electrons and protons to vibrate rapidly up and down, generating radiation at the same frequency as the incident light but emitting in all directions. This process of redirecting sunlight is called scattering.

The Earth’s atmosphere scatters away light in the blue, indigo, and violet wavelength region more prominently, while higher wavelength colors like red, orange and yellow are scattered sparsely. Due to this incongruous scattering, the sun appears yellow.

If you're fortunate enough to visit the International Space Station, you'll have a chance to see the sun's true white color, undistorted by Earth's atmosphere. From space, the sun appears as a massive, glowing sphere of white light.