The temperature map of the early universe, rendered as a false-color PIGMENTUM palette.
About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled enough for light to travel freely. That ancient light still surrounds us today, stretched by cosmic expansion into faint microwaves at a temperature of just 2.725 kelvin. It is the oldest light there is — and it is astonishingly uniform, varying by only a few hundred millionths of a degree from place to place.
Those tiny fluctuations are the seeds of every galaxy and cluster in the cosmos, but they are far too small to perceive directly. So cosmologists map them in false color: blue for regions slightly colder than average, red for slightly hotter, exactly as seen on the famous COBE, WMAP and Planck all-sky maps. This tool builds that same blue-to-red scale and matches each step to a named PIGMENTUM color.
The resolution slider sets how finely the temperature range is divided. Each band shows its temperature in kelvin, the deviation from the mean in microkelvin, and the exact named color it maps to — a small bridge between observational cosmology and the color library.
Astronomy and cosmology enthusiasts, science communicators, and designers after an otherworldly, physics-derived gradient.
Blue = colder than average (≈ −180 µK), red = hotter (≈ +180 µK). False color, as used on Planck/WMAP maps.