A summary of the 'sky' page set.

Updated: 24-JAN-1993 by SIC original by Scott I. Chase Olbers' Paradox Why isn't the night sky as uniformly bright as the surface of the Sun If the Universe has infinitely many stars, then it should be. After all, if you move the Sun twice as far away from us, we will intercept one-fourth as many photons, but the Sun will subtend one-fourth of the angular area. So the areal intensity remains ...

Olbers's Paradox (for a similar picture for galaxies) There is a simple, seemingly trivial question one can ask -- Why is the night sky dark This question was originally posed many years ago by a series of people (Kepler, Halley === ...

The basic question posed by Olbers.

Return to my Astronomy/Space pages Go to my home page Olbers' Paradox Copyright 1997, Jim Loy How much light do we get from the stars Let's assume that the stars are more or less evenly distributed throughout space. Now, let's draw a sphere around us: The number of stars in the sphere is roughly proportional to the volume of the sphere. A fairly simple integral (which I won't bother to ...