The darkness of the night sky offers a profound insight on the nature of the cosmos
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
I am an astronomer who studies stars and planets – including those outside our solar system – and their motion in space. The study of distant stars and planets helps astronomers like me understand why space is so dark. Picture a large bubble with Earth at the center. If the bubble were about 10 light years across, it would contain about a dozen stars. Of course, at several light years away, many of those stars would look pretty dim from Earth.
There just are not enough stars in the bubble to fill every line of sight. Of course, if you look in some directions in the sky, you can see stars. If you look at other bits of the sky, you can’t see any stars. And that’s because, in those dark spots, the stars that could block your line of sight are so far away their light hasn’t reached Earth yet. As time passes, light from these more and more distant stars will have time to reach us.
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