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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A lot of the astronomers here are replying that “there aren’t infinite stars, so this solves the paradox”.
That very well may be true, but here’s something far more interesting that is purely based on mathematics: **it is possible for an infinite number of light sources to add up to a non-infinite luminosity**, depending on how they’re spaced.
See this 3Blue1Brown video for an example and a visual explanation of how this can be possible: https://youtu.be/d-o3eB9sfls
Adding to this, the human eye can see a very limited range of light. The cosmic background radiation is also a form of light. Stars too far tend to be infrared so we can’t see it but images of CBR show that there’s everything mostly everywhere.
Don’t take this info too seriously and do some research because this is from the top of my head. Can’t google right now.
It’s interesting that poet Edgar Allan Poe was the first to suggest the solution to Olber’s Paradox.
“Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us a uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy – since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.”
Most of the stars are clustered in Galaxies
There is almost void between galaxies
Most of the stars we can see are from our Galaxy
Is the island-universes model
[Olber’s Paradox explained by Up & Atom](https://youtu.be/2MCt3AxCL6I)
Because of universal expansion, distant galaxies move away from us faster than the speed of light. They are not moving *through* space faster than light, which would violate physical laws; it is the expansion of space itself that leads to this outcome.
Light beyond the “observable universe” therefore will never have the opportunity to reach us.
ELI5: Although space is mostly empty, there is still a tiny bit of ‘dust’ floating in there. So the light from stars that are VERY far away has to get through a lot of spread out dust. But it’s enough dust to block the light from reaching us.
So we only see stars that are close enough or bright enough to shine through the dust.
It is lit up all around. But that light has been stretched to the realm outside of human’s seeing capability (infrared).
becouse with a naked eye you can see a very small portion of stars that are “nearby” with naked eye we see less then 1% of our own galaxy.
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