I somehow failed to notice that the article extended past the information on the author. Normally I see the author info at the end of the article. I did think three paragraphs was short,.
But, the article does make it look like "yellow" is hotter than "red" and cooler than "blue", which does make it seem reasonable to classify our Sun as a "yellow star" if we consider its temperature in comparison to the range of other stars' temperatures.
Yes, it was suspected early on that star color and temperature correlated, but the absorption lines told the greater story, followed by spectral energy distributions. Color is almost always a side feature.
But color only worked as a guide if white is ignored. White stars originally were in their own class, per Secchi and others, but, somehow, yellow got too attached to many stars, including the Sun.
Given how easy it is to falsify a yellow color, it's quite surprising to me that so little effort was given to it. I have to believe solar physicists quickly realized this as their projections were so white, and, notably, after the blue-end atmospheric extinctions. I'm still curious how this "yellow" perpetuation happened, though I think my guess (stated earlier) might be accurate enough.
As we have discussed before, "yellow" is a matter of perception with high variability among individuals. And, it is subjective even by any particular individual depending on what else it is seen with - our minds shift color perceptions to redefine "white" under varying sources of illumination with differing color spectra, once we have an object that we expect to be white.
Yes. "Color constancy" plays a key role in causing us to see white when a computer model says it is, say, peachy pink *cough*.
It would be interesting to find a bright and, if possible, whiter reference light source near a dim solar projection to see if any color shift occurs. My guess is that the source would have to be too high a temperature causing it to be too blue, perhaps.
Regardless, color should be treated for what it is, not how we can use and abuse it. It's simply what the vast majority would see, so not all that subjective in my opinion. [There are tint puzzles that test one's ability to see small variations in color.] A white star, as seen evenly attenuated in space, should be labeled a white star, especially when the other color hypotheses have been falsified.
So, this argument seems pretty silly to me. The sun's spectrum is rather flat in the frequency range that humans can see, and "yellow" is pretty much right in the middle of that range.
Agreed. Even the HR diagram includes a white star region (far too narrow a region, IMO), so I don't get why "yellow" is so appealing. Correcting from a "yellow dwarf", however, to a "white dwarf" means that the dwarf designation should also be tweaked.
Perhaps it's just "too much squeeze for the juice" to toss this up at the IAU meetings.