WHY IS THE NIGHT SKY DARK?
The Universe is such a complex and extensive topic that when talking about it, we can get to formulate millions of questions that we will hardly be able to answer, but that, by remaining unknowns, always encourage us to keep looking for the explanation they deserve. One of those questions was asked in 1823 by the German physician and astronomer Heinrich Olbers, this genuine question was called the “Olbers Paradox”.
The “Olbers Paradox” states that within a static and infinite universe, the night sky should be completely bright, with no dark or inconspicuous region visible to human eyes, all based on the fact that as light travels through our universe, the stars would be considered infinite for the simple reason of deducing them within an infinite universe, finally any space in the night sky, the smallest, would end up being occupied by a star, which would make the sky from our planet Earth look fully lit and bright. However, this statement was considered truly paradox in itself, since if we looked at the sky, we would show that there are an infinity of dark regions, totally contrary to what Olbers manifests; Although this statement had little support, it caused a great intrigue in the scientists of past centuries, they believed that the universe was eternal, infinitely large, that it did not change with time and that it was basically impossible to count all the stars, all this until the writer Edgar Allan Poe in an essay entitled “Eureka” says: “If the succession of stars had no end, then the sky would appear to us with a uniform luminosity, since there would not be a single point in all of it where it did not exist a star”. Although the apparently simple question about the reason for the existence of the dark night sky was asked since the 16th century, reaching an accepted answer took even longer, however today we can find endless solutions to this naive but difficult question. : Why is the night sky dark?
One of the main solutions to this controversial paradox was that of the existence of opaque bodies in the same proportion as that of the stars; that is to say that if we start from the affirmation that the universe is infinite, also its stars, logically their opaque bodies will necessarily be infinite, this would be an obstacle to the journey of light, making it unable to travel to Earth in all visible directions to the However, this solution was not entirely correct because the energy is neither created nor destroyed, which is why, if these opaque bodies received the light from these infinite stars, they would end up warming up and returning the energy in the form of light issued by themselves, so there would be a solution to our question.
On the other hand, we have the relativistic solution that starts from a single statement: “the universe is not infinite, but finite as suggested by the Big Bang theory”, so there is only a finite amount of light, so the dark regions of the universe would correspond to those areas in which light originated beyond 13.8 billion light years, which is the age of the universe and, therefore, the only time light would have had to reach us, however We can propose another solution without using the Big Bang theory, we could establish that the universe is finite, which would solve the problem of the Olbers paradox and solve the question of why the night sky is dark, but since We know the amount of hydrogen in the universe is very high, which is why as time goes by, this amount decreases. All this as a result of the stars using hydrogen to create helium, and helium to create heavier atoms, that is why if the universe were infinite that transformation process would have already culminated. The only way for this solution to become valid is that