Why don’t we constantly see new stars in the sky as an increase of light travels to us?

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with how light works and the constant expansion of what we term the “observable universe” why don’t we constantly see new stars appearing in the night sky as the observable part expands and stars/galaxies light reaches us for the first time?

The night sky has stayed relatively the same (accounting for changing postions over time, stella phenom, supernovas etc.) for all of humans written history.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Well, to be frank this has/ is happenning. Except that on a cosmic scale, the stars and galaxies become visible slowly over eons. Human history simply isn’t long enough for a noticeable change. Go back 10,000 years, the night sky is different, but not so much that you’d not be able to recognize constellations. Go back to the time of the dinosaurs, some 64 million years, and the sky look drastically different, with different stars shining, different galaxies beingvisible. Many starts shining then have long since burned out by today. Like wise many stars visible today weren’t even around back then.

Your other question is why can’t we see more of the universe as it continues to expand. That somehow there’s this greater unseen galactic mass. In reality, thanks to the background radiation mapping, we have a good idea of the expanse of scope of the universe. The observable universe isn’t so much what can be seen and then there’s this whole ocean of space just beyond the horizon as much as it is, the part of the universe that can be seen, measured, or studied, vs the portion of the universe that simply can not me seen measured or studied, but we can still observe a measured impact from that other part to know it exists. Dark matter.

Further, as the universe continues to expand, amd objects continue to shift away from one another, we will slowly begins seeing g fewer and fewer stars, not more. One theory of expansion has the universe spread so thin that the night sky becomes void of everything aside from local interstellar bodies. Lonely, but likely the fate of the universe if it’s still around.

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