Why the sky is dark at night
- 1 February 1974
- journal article
- other
- Published by AIP Publishing in Physics Today
- Vol. 27 (2) , 30-36
- https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3128443
Abstract
Let us imagine that stars similar to the Sun are uniformly distributed in an infinite and static universe. Edmund Halley in 1720, J. P. Loys de Chéseaux in 1744, and H. Wilhelm M. Olbers in 1823 showed this seemingly reasonable 16th and 17th century model of the universe leads to a remarkable paradox. For whatever direction we look in the sky our line of sight eventually intercepts a star, and the whole sky should therefore be ablaze with light as bright as the Sun. This startling disagreement between theory and observation is nowadays referred to as “Olbers's paradox.”Keywords
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