Is all of our universe… lit? Can you be hurtling through space and accidentally fly head first into a planet because oops you didn’t have your headlights on?
In: Physics
It is extremely unlikely for you to collide with anything in space. There is a gigantic amount nothing out there. So it’s far more likely to drift through a near empty abyss without collisions.
But in the unlikely event that you do end up heading towards a planet you don’t know about, you’d feel it’s gravity long before you hit it. So that’s a warning sign.
As for whether you can see it? Almost everything emits infrared light, so you probably have devices in your space ship that can detect that light, even if your naked eye can’t. Also if you are in a galaxy, which is where most planets are, there will be stars nearby that light it up.
If you were hurtling through the Milky Way, you would see basically the same view as our night sky, but all around you, and with many more/brighter stars (no light pollution from the ground to obscure them.
It would be equally beautiful and terrifying, I think.
But the Milky Way is a galaxy. Most of space is the in-between nothingness outside of galaxies. If you weren’t near anything at all, the only “stars” you see would themselves be entire galaxies.
You could ram into a planet. That’s what an asteroid impact is…but in this case, you are the asteroid. If you were in a ship and had controls, I think we can also assume you will have sensors to see the planet coming. There are rogue planets that drift all alone, so sure, hypothetically we can say that if you have no sensors and are *extremely unlucky* you could randomly hit a planet. But this would also mean entering a galaxy first, and surely you would know you were at least doing that.
No. There are large voids between galaxies of nothingness for hundreds of thousands of light years. There is also void space within galaxies.
I believe the term is “Orphan planets”; planets not attached to a star and just hurtle through space like a supermassive asteroid.
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