What is space made out of? What is the blackness in space?
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Without going into quantum mechanical gibberish:
Nothing. Aside from a speck of tiny dust here and there, nothing.
Space isn’t black either. Space has no colour. The black you are seeing just means the light coming from that direction is too faint for our eyes to make anything out of it but black (the lack of any light). Turning off the light in your bedroom doesn’t turn it purple. It turns it pitch black.
Nothing… It’s so wierd and hard to understand but nothing. It’s called interstellar medium – or space between stars – and it can be as empty as 1 hydrogen ion every kilometer.
In the traditional sense of *stuff*, space is made of nothing. Gas, dust, rocks, and all the rest of the matter in the universe is attracted to other matter because of gravity until it clumps together. There is like, *some* bits of gas and dust: maybe around 10^6 particles per cubic meter. For some context, a human body has somewhere around 10^27 particles, and a cubic meter of air has around 10^25 particles. So, think of the difference between how dense you are and how dense the air around you is: two orders of magnitude. Space is *twenty* orders of magnitude less dense.
You: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 particles
Meter^3 of air: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 particles
Interstellar space: 1,000,000 particles
That still looks like a big number, but it’s way less than even a single particle per cubic centimeter! That’s a whole lot of nothing.
However, quantum mechanics reveals that the entire universe is filled with quantum energy fields that have a little bit of energy. All particles are tiny packets of energy in a field, like a wave rising above the surface of water. Even where there is “nothing”, those fields are churning with energy like the surface of the ocean during a storm. Particles randomly pop into and out of existence, lasting for fractions of fractions of seconds. Those particles don’t exist long enough to do anything – and in fact, since they don’t interact with anything they arguably don’t “exist” at all. But the fields are there, throughout the universe.
Space is like normal air, but with the air removed.
Everything we know is made of atoms, right? Space is the lack of atoms. There’s nothing there. (without addressing quantum stuff)
The blue in our atmosphere is due to something we call Atmospheric Scattering – basically, the earth’s atmosphere is a giant prism, and we see the blue part. At sunset, the sky turns red because the angle is different, and we see a different part of the prism.
Space has no atmosphere for the light to bend through, therefore it’s black.
>What is space made out of?
The Eli5 answer? We don’t really know. General Relativity would say that it’s a kind of mesh that tells matter how to move. Quantum Mechanics would mostly say that it doesn’t matter; just use the known formulas to work out the probabilities of things happening. Looking at it from an Entropy standpoint might make you think that it’s just a place for information.
But really, we don’t know. Dark energy, dark matter, and our inability to reconcile our great two theories hint that we don’t have a handle on that space really is.
We see something as red if it reflects red light to our eyes.
Space is not black, it’s empty, so there’s nothing reflecting light to our eyes to be seen.
A lot of people are answering “Space is made out of nothing” but from my understanding that is wrong.
“Nothing” more aptly describes what existed before the big bang, as well as everything outside the universe.
Space is decidedly made out of *something*. That *something* is the medium through which electromagnetic waves travel; it’s what mass exists in. Waves of motion travel through the medium of water, but you wouldn’t describe the ocean as “nothing.” Sound waves travel through air, and you wouldn’t describe the atmosphere as “nothing.” In the same way you can’t describe space as “nothing.” We know *something* is there, because when it gets disturbed we can see it get [distorted.](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/black-hole-image-makes-history) From what I know, we just don’t know how to yet describe the *something* that the medium of space is.
As for what is the “blackness” of space? That is more a biological phenomenon. If your retina isn’t being stimulated by photons, your brain interprets that as black. The blackness of space is just an area where there aren’t enough photons reaching your eye to be perceived as a color. There is most certainly *something* there, though it may not be giving off photons for you to perceive (like looking through a glass of perfectly still clear water, you may not even see the water in the glass; but when it gets disturbed, we can see it get [distorted](https://as2.ftcdn.net/jpg/02/31/34/53/500_F_231345349_vE07qaA9sebjxHoJ6zz9uLJpXnnxpmea.jpg)).
Here’s an ELI5 with quantum mechanics:
The nothingness of space is understood to be a “quantum field.” All that means is, in the same way water feels like nothing to a fish, and air feels like almost nothing to you, outer space is the ultimate in feeling like nothing while still being something!
So what is it? It’s a field that contains every particle in the universe. It’s constantly in flux, which means particles are constantly appearing and disappearing. These are called “virtual particles” because of how they almost don’t exist (but do).
In addition to the source of all particles, it’s also the source of “dark energy.” We don’t know exactly what it is, but it is pushing the universe apart ever faster. The theory goes that negative mass produces an anti-gravity pushing effect, and the quantum field of the entire universe is the source of this negative mass.
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