Bare with me on this as clearly there is something fundamentally wrong with my understand of light particles, distance and stars but should it not be case that sometimes you should not be able to see them.
Since light travels in a straight line (mostly), and their distance are massive and my eye is so very small the tiniest of angles from which the particle leaves the star would become ernomous variations by the time it reached me.
With that in mind, even with the insane number of particles being released, shouldn’t they become so wildly diffuse and spread out that they become to faint to detect or diffuse enough that I see the star then move 2 feet away and don’t.
I guess an anology would be that a torch works fine on a wall 10 feet away but won’t light up a spot a 100 feet away even though all the particles are travelling in a straight line.
If I can see a star from every single position on my side of the planet how isn’t that lighting up the whole sky or are a few particles enough to make my retina work and see a very small point of light.
Thanks
In: Physics
I mean you’re basically right with everything you said. I think you just need to accept how insane it is that light/stars work that way.
>Since light travels in a straight line (mostly), and their distance are massive and my eye is so very small the tiniest of angles from which the particle leaves the star would become ernomous variations by the time it reached me.
This shows just how many photons are emitted from stars. It’s an unfathomable amount. It’s so much that, yes, it can travel across the galaxy, hit your eye, and you can perceive it. Because stars radiate light in all directions, technically the light from a star is hitting every part of Earth’s surface that is directly exposed to it. It’s faint enough to not illuminate Earth, but strong enough for you to perceive it. Unlike the sun, which is so close that it’s power lights up our planet and makes it impossible for our eyes to look right at it. Stars are just versions of our sun much farther away.
>With that in mind, even with the insane number of particles being released, shouldn’t they become so wildly diffuse and spread out that they become to faint to detect
Yes, and they do. The stars you see in the sky are only the stars that are relatively close to us. Every single star you see is just the stars within our own galaxy. You are not seeing a single star from another galaxy because, as you said, the light has been diffused so much over the immense distances between galaxies. The only thing you can see outside our galaxy with your bare eye is the Andromeda galaxy. On a clear night with no light pollution, you can see a slight blur about the size of your thumb, and that’s the entire Andromeda galaxy, the next closest galaxy to us. In short, the stars you see are close enough for their light to reach us and yet be powerful enough for us to see, and everything else is so far away that their light is not perceivable by our naked eye.
>I guess an anology would be that a torch works fine on a wall 10 feet away but won’t light up a spot a 100 feet away even though all the particles are travelling in a straight line.
This is exactly the same as what I just described about stars outside of our galaxy. But stars are infinitely more powerful than a torch, so you need to amplify the scale to hundreds of thousands of lightyears.
>If I can see a star from every single position on my side of the planet how isn’t that lighting up the whole sky or are a few particles enough to make my retina work and see a very small point of light.
Yes, exactly right.
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