The first green star is a white dwarf, and most white dwarfs really are white
If you could park a spaceship near the white dwarf WD J1330+6435 and look at it, it would be pale chartreuse green. That’s the headline result of “Any colour you like: the diverse chromaticities of white dwarfs” by Mark Hollands, Boris Gänsicke, Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay and Detlev Koester, published in RAS Techniques and Instruments this October (arXiv:2610.18966). To the authors’ knowledge, no other star of any kind has been claimed to look green. The same paper finds a white dwarf 48 light-years away that would glow salmon-pink, others that come out yellow, cyan, purple and blue, and one less exciting result: across the roughly 150 white dwarfs within 20 parsecs of the Sun, the median one is white. ...