The Average Colour Of The Universe Is Beige

In 2002, astronomers at Johns Hopkins University asked a wonderfully absurd question: what colour would you get if you averaged the light from every galaxy? They analyzed the spectra of over 200,000 galaxies from the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey. The initial answer was reported as pale turquoise, then corrected after a white-balance bug — the true average is a warm, creamy beige. Hex code #FFF8E7. They named it Cosmic Latte. It is not the colour you would see from deep space, where it is overwhelmingly dark, but the colour you would get if you poured all the universe's light into a bucket. Somewhere, the cosmos is a cup of milky tea.