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Originally Posted by Eroica
Thanks for the graph. I found a similar one in a book and it too puts the Sun's lambda-max at about 450 nm, which is really annoying because the BA says the Sun's light curve peaks in the green (500-550 nm). Grrrhh!
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Well, it's blue-green. The peak is around 480 nm as can be seen in that graph linked in the first page of this thread (I looked for a solar spectrum a couple of years ago and found that very graph; in my book I say the Sun peaks in the green). The basic complication here is that the Sun is not only not a blackbody, but it has those complicated absorption features.
Those kinds of things can have funny effects. A cool star is redder than a hot star, right? Not always. As you look at cooler and cooler brown dwarfs, the color at one point stops getting redder and actually gets bluer. There are absorption lines that pop up (or would that be down?) at cooler temperatures that absorb the redder light, leaving the bluer light to get through (and this is all out in the near IR as I recall, so by bluer I mean nearer the "real" red in the optical bands. Still with me?).
Unfortunately, nature rarely gives us something as nice and neat as a laboratory/textbook example of an object.