Blue is the commonest colour in this catalogue, and it arrives by two completely unrelated routes. Cold giants are blue because methane in their frigid air absorbs red light and leaves the rest. Ultra-hot Jupiters are blue because they have no clouds at all: bare, scorching hydrogen scatters blue light back at you, the same physics that makes Earth's sky blue, while sodium vapour eats the yellow. This walk alternates between the two — a freezer, then a furnace, all the way down.
How picked
Picked automatically from the current data: the bluest cold, methane-cloud worlds interleaved with the bluest ultra-hot, cloud-free ones, one per star system.
A furnace, 2,950 K: 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, and its 10,000 K blue-white sun pushes it cooler.
⚠ ABOUT THIS SWATCHThis colour falls outside the range a screen can display — the swatch is the closest your screen can get.
A furnace, 2,470 K: 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, and its 9,360 K blue-white sun pushes it cooler.
⚠ ABOUT THIS SWATCHThis colour falls outside the range a screen can display — the swatch is the closest your screen can get.
A furnace, 3,921 K: 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, and its 9,270 K blue-white sun pushes it cooler.
⚠ ABOUT THIS SWATCHThis colour falls outside the range a screen can display — the swatch is the closest your screen can get.
A furnace, 2,450 K: 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, and its 9,194 K blue-white sun pushes it cooler.
⚠ ABOUT THIS SWATCHThis colour falls outside the range a screen can display — the swatch is the closest your screen can get.
HOW THESE 8 WERE PICKED
Picked automatically from the current data: the bluest cold, methane-cloud worlds interleaved with the bluest ultra-hot, cloud-free ones, one per star system.