Realistic Star Frequencies/Colors

UPDATE: A much better resource for frequencies of types of stars is on this wiki page for Elite: Dangerous.

I’ve done a lot of research on stellar classification, perhaps too much. Here’s a visual representation (not at all to scale!) of stars by type from O to L.. and L is a brown dwarf, so it’s not technically a “star” per say.

And here’s a table of those color values (in percents RGBA):

  O: {0.521, 0.521, 0.996, 1}
  B: {0.701, 0.898, 1, 1}
  A: {1, 1, 1, 1}
  F: {1, 0.996, 0.780, 1}
  G: {0.988, 0.972, 0.250, 1}
  K: {0.905, 0.549, 0.015, 1}
  M: {0.847, 0.011, 0.031, 1}
  L: {0.302, 0.187, 0.177, 1}

As for the frequencies (as in, percent of stars that are a specific type), they have been slightly manipulated (if I am remembering correctly) to make the rarest types a little more common, but are based on my best guesses from research:

  O: 0.00003
  B: 0.13
  A: 0.6
  F: 3
  G: 7.6
  K: 12.1
  M: 76.45
  L: 0.11

A couple last notes:

• There are two more brown dwarf / substellar mass classifications I could be using (T and Y), but I am not because they are not commonly visible.
• Because L-type (and T & Y) “stars” are so hard to see, it is entirely possible they could outweigh the existence of other types, but we just can’t see them!

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Code to create the image above is available here.