Children around the world have always drawn the sun in a slightly different way. Some tend to draw a yellow circle surrounded by straight lines, sometimes with a smiley face. In Japan, children may draw the circle in red, similar to their country's flag. Now, there is a debate about the color of the star of our solar system, and some insist that it has changed its hues.

It all started on May 3 when author Jackie DeBoy tweeted that the round yellow sun of her childhood had suddenly turned white and blurry. Within a few days, the post gained over six million views and divided users into two camps: those who agreed with Dubois and those who said the sun always looked white.

I'm just telling a person in their 20s that the sun used to be yellow when I was a child and he's laughing. The last time he saw a yellow sun was on Teletubbies. Here's the sun right now. White and a weird shape. How's it looking where you are? pic.twitter.com/C3BJdt7s8I

— Jacqui Deevoy (@JacquiDeevoy1) May 3, 2023

"The sun would look green if your eye was able to look at it," said Dean Pesnell , project scientist for NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. "Basically, when you look at the sun, it has enough of all the different colors and it's so bright that everyone's eyes They light up like crazy and say, 'It's too bright for me to tell you what color it is.' That's why the sun looks white to us." From a distance of 93 million kilometers, the Sun usually appears as a white spot in the sky. But the reason many people perceive a yellow hue has to do with the way the light is scattered, Pesnel said.

Molecules in the air redirect the blue and violet wavelengths of sunlight, allowing more yellow and red ones to hit our eyes. (This is also why the sky looks blue). As day turns to night, sunlight has to pass through a thicker atmosphere, so more molecules scatter its blue hues, leading to a dazzling display of oranges and reds during sunset, he added.

"The sun is in the middle of its life, and it still has many years before it changes colors," Pesnel said. So why are people convinced that she has become whiter? "It has more to do with the brain's perception of the sun than astrophysics," Pasnell said. "When astronomers say color, they actually mean temperature."

Color is what people see when a wavelength enters the eye. There, special cells send signals to the brain, which translate the waves into the colors we see. Although everyone essentially receives the same information, what we make of it is marked by individual life experiences and backgrounds, said Alice Skelton , who studies developmental color science at the University of Sussex in England. How we were raised and learned to associate colors with objects can also influence our perceptions, Skelton said.