eli5 How do we see so far into space? Wouldn’t stars block each other in front of the “camera”?

Question

I imagine it like looking at a a forest, you see the first couple trees very clear, and the farther you look into the forest you see less and less trees, because the view is blocked? So how can we see stars so far deep into space? Wouldn’t the stars block each others view?

In: 1

Answer 1

This is called Olbers Paradox. If space is infinite then eventually each point in the sky would have a star behind it and the sky would be very bright. The resolution is that the universe has only been around for 13.x billion years and stars further than a certain distance haven’t had time for the light from them to get to us yet. In the areas that are close enough that light has had time to get to us, stars are pretty sparse and we see a lot of black sky.