As the title says, if there’s infinite stars, wouldn’t the light from all of them have reached us and made our night sky become completely white from the number of stars there are? Is there just not enough stars in proximity to earth for all the light to reach us in time to see?
I’m sure there’s a simple answer, but it’s 1am here and my brain can’t figure it out.
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This is quite a famous question in cosmology. It’s known as [Olber’s Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox) and is posed in a very similar way to yours.
Funnily enough, the seemingly accepted explanation of this does not talk about stars, but about the remnants of the Big Bang. The idea is that the radiation that filled the universe at the time it first became transparent (if I recall correctly) about 300 million years after the bang) has been red-shifted by the expansion of the universe so it is now not visible light – this is the famous 3K background microwave radiation. This is an interesting take, but I’m not sure how it answers the paradox.
My original understanding (which may be bogus) is that even though the universe could be infinite, the observable universe – the parts from which light could reach us – is not infinite, and does not contain an infinite number of stars. Therefore, the basic premise (“every direction in which we look, we should see a star”) fails. I think this is sufficient.
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