Why Outer Space is Dark?
Have you ever wondered why space appears black and dark, even though there are trillions of luminous stars?
This intriguing question was famously posed by the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, known for Olbers' Paradox.
Olbers' Paradox highlights a fascinating contradiction: the universe is filled with numerous light sources such as stars, nebulae, galaxies, and accretion disks around black holes. Yet, the night sky remains predominantly dark. To understand this paradox, we must delve into the nature of light and the vastness of the universe.
Light, despite being the fastest entity in the universe, traveling at approximately 299,792 kilometers per second, has its limitations. The universe is immensely vast, and the distances between celestial objects are staggering. For instance, light from the Sun takes about 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth. Given these immense distances, the light from distant stars cannot uniformly illuminate the entire sky.
Moreover, the universe is not static; it is expanding. This expansion causes the light from distant galaxies to stretch and shift towards the red end of the spectrum, a phenomenon known as redshift. As a result, some light becomes undetectable to the human eye, contributing to the darkness of the…
