The Color of the Universe is "LATTE".    June 24, 2002 Posted: 11:12 AM EDT
                                                                            BALTIMORE, Maryland (AP)
- Good news for coffee lovers: Space, the final frontier, is the color of a latte (see background).
   so say astronomers Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry at Johns Hopkins University.
In January of 2002, the two determined that the universe was a sprightly
pale turquoise
, then after discovering a glitch in their software in March, they realized that the average color was actually a milky brown.  Not knowing what to call it, besides beige, they solicited suggestions, prompting nearly 300 e-mails with ideas including:
Big Bang Beige Cappuccino Cosmico Galactic Gold,  and Infinite Sand.

     What is shape of Universe?
a dodecahedral space

The winner?...    COSMIC LATTE.
Ivan Baldry, a postdoctoral fellow, said he and Glazebrook both love coffee, which factored into the decision.
Cosmic Latte is also appropriate because it's close to "latteo," which "means Milky Way in Galileo's native Italian".
 

Glazebrook and Baldry discovered the milky coffee hue after gathering light from galaxies as far as
several billion light years away. They processed the light, breaking it into its various colors
— similar to the way a prism turns sunlight into a rainbow — and averaging the color values.

back