"Let’s talk about the dark night.
Our common
assumption is that the night sky is supposed to be dark with only few dots of
light.
But
then, aren’t there supposed to billions upon billions of stars in the
night sky emitting light. Yes, they are very far away, but, there is
nothing stopping (like air or glass) the light from reaching us.
So, shouldn’t all those stars make the night sky (very) bright and
not dark ?
This is actually called Olbers’ Paradox.
Let’s look at the
problem in another way. We can divide the universe into a series of concentric
shells, being 5 light years thick. Thus, a certain number of stars will be in
the shell 1,00,000 to 1,00,005 light years away. If the universe is homogeneous
at a large scale (i.e., static), then there would be four times as many stars
in a second shell between 2,00,000 to 2,00,005 light years away.