True color of Milky Way described

PITTSBURGH, Jan. 12 (UPI) -- U.S. astronomers investigating the true color of the Milky Way galaxy say its name is apt, because it is indeed white -- but not just any white.

Because the Earth is within the Milky Way, it has not been easy to determine what our galaxy might appear like to an observer outside of it, which could reveal much about our home galaxy, Jeffrey Newman of the University of Pittsburgh said.

"The problem is similar to determining the overall color of the Earth, when you're only able to tell what Pennsylvania looks like," Newman said in a UP release Thursday.

Color is one of the most important properties of galaxies that astronomers study, he said.

"That tells us basically how old the stars in the galaxy are, how recently it's been forming stars -- are they forming today or did its stars form billions and billions of years ago?"

Newman and colleagues analyzed data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey with information on almost a million galaxies, searching for galaxies with similar mass to the Milky Way and similar rates of star formation, looking for near matches to our galaxy.

For those that most closely matched our own Milky Way, they took an average and came up with a precise measure of what color our home galaxy must be.

It's indeed white, they said; specifically, very close to the light seen when looking at spring snow in the early morning, shortly after dawn.