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Where Roman loses the colour

the worlds the band view gets furthest wrong
This tour

The Roman Space Telescope's coronagraph will not see a planet's whole spectrum. It sees visible light through three narrow filters, and a colour has to be rebuilt from those three samples. Usually that lands close. On these worlds it does not: the reconstruction misses the features that carried the colour and comes back a different colour entirely — deep blue planets returning as salmon pink. Each stop shows both, side by side.

How picked

Picked automatically from the current data: the largest perceptual gap (ΔE2000) between the full-spectrum colour and the Roman band reconstruction, one per star system.

Honesty

Both colours are modelled. The Roman band view is what Roman's supported filters would recover from this modelled spectrum — no real Roman measurements exist yet.

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PHASE

#00385c
#006fb5
#0fa3ff
#69c5ff
#c2e7ff

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ΔE 44 lost

K2-22 b

K2-22 · 3,879 K · M0 V Modelled

Full spectrum says #66c4ff; Roman's three bands reconstruct #ffad84 — ΔE 44 apart, which the eye reads as a different colour altogether. The features that carry its colour fall mostly between Roman's three filters, because it is too hot for clouds to survive, so almost nothing comes back; the little that does is blue light scattered off bare hydrogen, the way our own sky is blue.

⚠ ABOUT THIS SWATCHThis colour falls outside the range a screen can display — the swatch is the closest your screen can get.

Temperature
2,100 K
Size
2.3 × Earth's radius
Distance
795.3 light-years
Reflects
5.5 % of the light that reaches it
As Roman would see it
#ffad84 ΔE 44
Model assumes
ultra-hot, cloud-free, very dark
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