If you took a group of solar panels outside the solar system into interstellar space, would they produce power? Would they get power from other stars?
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“Solar” panels are perhaps more accurately described as “light” panels – they can generate electricity from any sufficiently bright light source (I’m sure there are some restrictions on exactly what wavelengths they can generate from, but that’s a different matter). The point is, you can use a flashlight, or a fire, or any other such source of light to generate electricity.
So you could definitely generate power from solar panels around another star, or even probably the accretion disk of a black hole (gas and other matter swirling around it that gets heated enough to glow brightly).
The issue with trying to use solar panels in interstellar space, then, wouldn’t be with the origin or type of light. Rather, the problem would be that, because you’re so far away from any significant light source, your solar panel is only getting hit by a pretty trivial amount of light and thus will only produce a pretty trivial amount of electricity. It would be like trying to power a house with rooftop solar by shining one of those tiny keychain flashlights on it.
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