# Gaia Gbp - Grp: why does it get larger as star gets redder?

As an enthusiastic amateur scientist, I'm plowing my way through a cool Gaia DR2-based paper, "An Empirical Measurement of the Initial-Final Mass Relation with Gaia White Dwarfs". I'm doing all right, but have hit a roadblock: understanding the meaning of the stellar color value GBP - GRP.

GBP is the blue photometry value, and GRP is the red photometry value, so GBP - GRP is the difference between the two, giving a number broadly encoding the star's color. Here's a graph from the paper that uses this value:

It's a graph of white dwarf ("WD") color versus absolute magnitude. On the left, the absolute magnitude MG increases (downwards) as the star grows dimmer, and across the bottom the color GBP - GRP increases (rightwards) as the star grows redder. Hence the slope of the curve; as a WD cools, it gets smoothly dimmer and redder.

But wait! as a star gets redder, the the "blue" brightness should become relatively smaller than the "red" brightness, right? So, the GBP - GRP value should get smaller and smaller, right? But that's the opposite of what this graph (and other graphs in the paper) apparently shows.

Should GBP - GRP get larger as a star cools and gets redder? Where am I confused? (I'm assuming the professionals aren't all confused...)

But you demonstrate that you know the answer to this question! Fainter objects have larger magnitudes. So as the white dwarf becomes cooler and redder, its blue magnitude $(G_{BP})$ grows by more than its red magnitude $(G_{RP})$ and the colour-index $(G_{BP} - G_{RP})$ becomes larger. This is very similar to the commonly used $B-V$ colour, which is larger for cooler stars.