Astronomy: Olbers' Paradox

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Olbers' Paradox Olbers' paradox, also known as the dark night paradox or Olbers and Cheseaux's paradox, is a historical argument in astrophysics and physical cosmology that says the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe. If the universe were static, homogeneous at a large scale, and populated by an infinite number of stars, any line of sight from Earth must end at the surface of a star and if light from an infinite distance could reach Earth, the night sky should be completely illuminated and very bright.

Commentary

Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)

Olbers' Paradox Olbers' paradox, also known as the dark night paradox or Olbers and Cheseaux's paradox, is a historical argumen t in astrophysics and physical cosmology that says the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe. If the universe were static, homogeneous at a large scale, and populated by an infinite number of stars, any line of sight from Earth must end at the surface of a star and if light from an infinite distance could reach Earth, the night sky should be completely illuminated and very bright. This contradicts the observed darkness and non-uniformity of the night sky.

Commentary

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Why Olbers' Paradox matters: Cosmology addresses the deepest questions we can ask: where did the universe come from, what is it made of, and what will happen to it in th e future? Modern cosmological models do not make all of these assumptions. The darkness of the night sky is one piece of evidence for a dynamic universe, such as the Big Bang model. That model explains the observed darkness by invoking expansion of the universe, which increases the wavelength of visible light originating from the Big Bang to microwave scale via a process known as redshift. The resulting microwave radiation background has wavelengths much longer (millimeters instead of nanometers), which appear dark to the naked eye. Although he was not the first to describe it, the paradox is popularly named after the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers (1758–1840).

Commentary

Source: Internal

Deep dive: Olbers' Paradox The darkness of the night sky is one piece of evidence for a dynamic universe, such as the Big Bang model. That mo del explains the observed darkness by invoking expansion of the universe, which increases the wavelength of visible light originating from the Big Bang to microwave scale via a process known as redshift. The resulting microwave radiation background has wavelengths much longer (millimeters instead of nanometers), which appear dark to the naked eye. Although he was not the first to describe it, the paradox is popularly named after the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers (1758–1840). Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)