Infinite Stars - Dark at night

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Soldato
Joined
24 Aug 2011
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ABQ, NM
Olber's Paradox, right. The main explanation is that Earth is too young for most light to have reached us.

Does this mean as time passes night time will get brighter and brighter?
 
For many reasons I doubt that night time will get significantly brighter - though it will brighten somewhat. At the very least there is always going to be some balance with stars we can see in the night sky long since actually gone, etc.

Over time we will probably see more stars in the night sky - or atleast the visual noise of background stars will be a bit more dense.
 
I very much doubt during the limited existence of the human race this will ever be an issue. I can't see the planet sustaining us for more than a few thousand years by which point a few more stars will have lit up :)
 
Now I am no physicist at all - I am sure we have them though - but surely when the objects are sufficiently far away in an expanding universe the light coming towards us would be redshifted and therefore most likely you would have balance between new stuff coming into view through time and the decreasing energy from those stars.
 
Yer, apparently that is also part of the reason, but the article I saw said the main reason is the age of the universe. That's why I wondered if at some point in the future it would be more bright than it is now. Apparently if you go to the Sahara desert it is pitch black. You can't see anything...
 
No, it shouldn't be for the reason I gave. And if you look at most star names then they are in Arabic - that is for a reason and the Sahara is a very good place to see stars. The blackness you are talking about is the absence of light pollution not the absence of starlight.
 
The space-time between galaxies is expanding at exponential speed, eventually faster than the speed of light. So eventually all we would see is the light of the milky way, and probably the closest galaxy we are are due to merge with (cant remember the name).

It's all to do with the super massive black holes at the center of galaxies.
 
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