how we can see a star billions of light year away and nothing in between hiding it?
In: Planetary Science
Space is mostly empty space.
The universe is mostly nothing with a few small bits of matter here and there.
We also only see the parts that we can see because there is nothing blocking the view.
It is like standing in a forest and seeing trees everywhere. Some of the trees might be quite far away and you would be surprised that you can see them with nothing blocking the view, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other trees that you can’t see in the forest. (Just that the universe is a very, very thin forest with a few copse of trees in a whole lot of empty fields.)
Also the farthest star you can see with the naked eye is only a few thousand light years away instead of a billions of light years.
For looking at things much further away we often use instruments that allow us to look through things like clouds of dust.
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