system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What is the Color of the Sun: White or Yellow?

I remembering hearing during a science interview that our sun's color is white instead of yellow.  It only appears yellow because our atmosphere filters out the other colors.  The reasoning they used was that if the Sun were yellow, then snow would appear as yellow instead of white.  That reasoning does not have me convinced =/.

Can anyone please shed some light on this topic?
gpt
Color is a bizarre, only quasi-defined notion -- it only loosely maps to the spectrum.  Hence, there are several good answers:

* **The Sun is yellow** both by contrast to the blue sky and because of scattering in the atmosphere.  If you look at the Sun with neutral-density filters that don't affect the spectrum passing through them, the spectrum is skewed toward the red by scattering of blue light (which goes to form the sky).  The mixture of dominant red and green elements gives a yellow resultant color.  If you simply squint, so that you can see the very bright Sun embedded in blue sky, then to the extent that you see color at all it is extra-yellow by contrast to the blue sky around it.

* **The Sun is green** because its emission spectrum is peaked in the green.  

* **The Sun is blue** by contrast to the very red/yellow light we use indoors.  Its characteristic temperature is 6000K compared to 2700K for incandescent lights, so a small amount of sunlight seen in a darkened and artificially-lit room will appear quite blue.  (This is why old black-and-white TVs, which had a 6000K characteristic color, gave off the famous "blue glow").

* **The Sun is white** because sunlight is the most spectrally-even light most people ever experience.  Truly spectrally even light appears magenta or bluish magenta by contrast, though of course it just looks white after a while if it is the ambient light source.