The famous poet who solved a confusing Astronomical Paradox
Did you know it was a poet who solved the Olbers’ Paradox
First some information about the Olbers’ paradox-
Olbers’ paradox is named after German Astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers.He posed the problem in 1823 and even tough the paradox is named after him he is not considered to be the first person to pose the question. It is known that the question was being asked as early as the time of Kepler(1610). The problem statement of Olbers’ Paradox is —
What the statement means is simple —
If the universe is infinitely large and has an infinite number of light sources then even during night every star should reflect on earth and the stars at a distance should fill the gap in between the stars near us. So the night sky should be full of light from all these sources filling in the dark sky and not just a collection of light dots in a dark sky.
In even simpler terms the question being asked is-
Why the hell is night sky dark if their are an infinite number of stars out there? Shouldn’t light from every star have filled the dark sky at night?
Some solutions for this paradox can be -
- The universe is finite.
- After a certain distance in space no more stars exist.
- The light from distant stars have not reached us yet.
Now it’s time to unveil the famous poet’s name who published the first known solution for the paradox.
Mr. Edgar Allen Poe
Yes! It was Poe who wrote the first known solution to the paradox. The originator of detective fiction. The man. The myth. The legend. A poet everyone has heard about.
He writes in his essay Eureka —
Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us a uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy — since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.
Poe basically said that it was point number 3 from my above mentioned possible reasons that the night sky is dark.
He puts forward the point that their is no point after which stars just stop existing thus point number 2 is out of picture. As the speed of light is not infinite it takes light some time to reach Earth. Once the distance of the light source becomes too large the time for light to reach earth also becomes large.
It takes light 8 minute20seconds to reach earth from sun. It takes 4.2 years for light to reach Earth from the next nearest star — Proxima Centuri.
Now the argument is that the stars are too far away for light to have reached Earth. The universe if not infinite years old and has a certain age. The stars far away from us just need more time to make their light reach Earth.
You might think that in future the dark nights will exist no more. Well you’d be wrong.
The universe is ever expanding. It means that the distance among the galaxies is increasing but the distance among the stars of the same galaxy is not. The stars currently in our galaxy are the ones visible to us. Hence as the universe keeps on expanding the stars from other galaxies will get farther away and will not be visible in the night sky.
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