"Take everyone’s favorite binary star, Albireo, whose components
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Science explains that compared with its golden counterpart, the blue star is hotter because its greater mass creates awesome gravitational pressure and a boosted burn rate in its core.
---But few astronomers know that those colors don’t exist when no one’s looking.
---That’s because light is really just an energy morsel composed of alternating magnetic and electric fields.
---Neither field has brightness nor color. Instead, when that invisible electromagnetic energy strikes an animal’s cone-shaped retina cell, it inaugurates a biological process where millions of neurons cooperatively fashion the sensation of “blue.”
**Creating visual experiences consumes half the brain’s capacity.
So, while Albireo is some 400 light-years away, its colorful image occurs solely within the skull.
What’s more, usually-gorgeous Albireo is colorless if it’s not optically intensified by a lens or mirror.
---Our retina has about 100 million specialized rod-shaped cells that solely function in low-energy situations and deliver their sensations in grayscale alone.
It’s the less-sensitive cones,
numbering only 6 million,
that register color.
That’s why the Pleiades look gray or white to the naked eye but pastel blue through binoculars." Astronomy
