WASHINGTON(AP) - The color of the universe is not an intriguing pale turquoise, asastronomers recently announced. It's actually beige - and a rather ordinarybeige at that.

TwoJohns Hopkins University astronomers announced in January they had averaged allthe colors from the light of 200,000 galaxies and concluded that if the humaneye could see this combined hue, it would be a sprightly pale green. That, theysaid, was the color of the universe.

ButKarl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry said Thursday that their conclusion was wrong.They had been tripped up by flawed software that was uncovered by colorengineers who checked their data.

``Itis embarrassing,'' Glazebrook said. ``But this is science. We're not likepoliticians. If we make mistakes, we admit them. That's how science works.''

Theeffect of the error was that the computer picked a nonstandard white from itselectronic palette and mixed it with the other colors to come up with the turquoise.When the error was corrected and replaced with a standard white index, beigewas the result, Glazebrook said.

``Itlooks like beige,'' he said. ``I don't know what else to call it. I wouldwelcome suggestions.''

InJanuary, Baldry called the turquoise ``cosmic spectrum green.'' But the pairoffered no fancy name for the new beige hue.

Tofind this average color, Glazebrook and Baldry gathered light from galaxies outto several billion light years. They processed the light to break it into thevarious colors _ similar to how a prism turns sunlight into a rainbow. Theyaveraged the color values for all the light and converted it to the primarycolor scale seen by the human eye.

Glazebrooksaid the underlying data was correct. The problem came when the scientific datawas converted into a hue compatible with the perception of the human eye.

Theastronomer said that expressing the color for popular viewing was not even partof the original scientific experiment. They did it ``as a lark.''

``Wewere doing this as an amusing footnote to our paper,'' said Glazebrook. ``Thenthere was a huge media thing. We were completely overwhelmed. We didn't expectit to get so big.''