TL;DR
This paper establishes a standardized, astrophysically motivated color palette for star representations in digital media, based on stellar spectra and human color perception, correcting common misconceptions.
Contribution
It introduces a method to compute accurate star colors from stellar spectra and provides a publicly available tool for generating these colors for various astronomical objects.
Findings
Significant deviations between spectral and black body star colors.
No yellow, green, cyan, or purple stars exist in the main sequence.
Red dwarfs appear orange, white dwarfs pale orange, not white.
Abstract
Publications in astrophysics are nowadays mainly published and read in digitized formats. Astrophysical publications in both research and in popular outreach often use colorful representations of stars to indicate various stellar types, that is, different spectral types or effective temperatures. Computer generated and computer displayed imagery has become an integral part of stellar astrophysics communication. There is, however, no astrophysically motivated standard color palette for illustrative representations of stars and some stars are actually represented in misleading colors. We use pre-computed PHOENIX and TLUSTY stellar model spectra and convolve them with the three standard color matching functions for human color perception between 360nm and 830nm. The color matching functions represent the three sets of receptors in the eye that respond to red, green, and blue light.…
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