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If light can travel freely through space, why isn’t the Earth perfectly lit all the time? Where does all the light from all the stars get lost?

· Astrophysics,Physics,Light,Science

One of our readers posed this question to us and rather than try and answer it ourselves, we found an expert on the field, David Grant Taylor, an Astrophysicist from the University of Alberta:

Olber’s paradox basically said that if there were an infinite number of stars, then there would be an infinite amount of radiation. Because we later found out that our Universe had limits. The paradox has been was partly proven wrong because we “know” there are not an infinite number of Stars because we have viewed the edge of the Universe we live in. Since it is finite, it MUST have been brought about by a Big Bang and there is no other possible explanation. Actually, we have no direct observations of that Bang and it does conflict with a number of very fundamental principles in Physics. One of the big conflicts is that the “Singularity” that started things is theorized by some to have had zero linear dimensions. That’s something that contradicts both the Planck Length Constant and Quantum physics. Fundamentally they say there are Quantum minimums for the dimensions of all matter and energy. Something else fundamental about the Big Bang: why could it overcome being the biggest Black Hole||Schwarzschild Object||SO in the entire history of our Universe. Doesn’t that say SO’s must have limits, and that limit is proved by the Big Bang. That logic sounds a little twisted to me. It also says that it happened 13.8 billion years ago and there is no other way for our reality to come about. If something happened 13.8 billion years ago, how can we possibly say we are so certain of ANY aspects of that event - including both its size and what exactly is the evidence we have of it happening that long ago.

Instead, why don’t we try an alternate explanation for “Olbers Paradox”. We do see a smooth sky of nothing but EM. Because the Stars are so far apart, it doesn’t rise to the level Olber conjectured. There is another explanation: the paradox presumes that there is no obstruction to the signal at all. And I’m not talking about the shadows that planets, dead stars, Schwarzschild Objects create, I’m talking about the free hydrogen that must be in our reality. It is very, very slow, but the production of new stars of all dimensions happens continually. Just a SINGLE argument for that: very large stars are universally agreed to have much shorter lifetimes than small stars because their cores are much hotter and highly compressed, so that leads to a much higher rate of elements fusing into higher elements - so the Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, etc. are consumed at a much faster rate. Some of them are so big they blow up with a Supernova.

So even if you add things like Supernovas, why isn’t it perfectly bright? The Supernovas must add to the reasoning . . . well, no. The ongoing formation and closure of Stellar objects must mean that there is hydrogen everywhere. Fantastically thin, but it is there. How do we know? Because it does mean that our sky is filled with a EM signal everywhere. The hydrogen diffracts and absorbs that EM to the point where there is a balance between the amount of light we receive in this part of our Universe and the temperature that level of EM brings to that Universal cloud of Hydrogen gas. It’s about 2.73 kelvins (−270.42 °C; −454.76 °F) We call that universal EM signal the Cosmic MicrowaveBackground radiation. Mostly it’s just shortened to CMB. There is no paradox, Olber was right in some ways, wrong in others. Do we have any other data for this Hydrogen “Universal_sphere” of gas in our reality? Yes, there is. Any matter impediment to any signal raises the temperature of that matter, and it may re-emit that signal, at a lower frequency because some of the energy has been lost in transfer of energy to the matter. The more of that matter, the greater the frequency decrease. Eventually it will lower it to a Planck level signal and disappear. But the intergalactic clouds in our reality is so thin, it takes millions of light years to shift that frequency so that it is both measurable (the Hubble Constant) and overcomes the Doppler-Fizeau effects that would be brought about by the random motion of the objects in our Universe.

We can be fairly sure that it is random hydrogen just from the fact that Andromeda[M31] and our Galaxy, the Milky Way, are moving towards one another. The usual explanation is that they were “bound together by Gravity”. The only difficulty with that postulate is this: if you track the motion they are having together, and presume that the approach velocity has been getting higher and higher as they move together - that’s the way free fall works. The M31 Galaxy is 2.53700E6ly away now and is moving towards us at approximately 301km/s||3.0100E5m/s Just presume, as happens in gravitational descent, it has been accelerating since they first came into existence 10 billion years ago - just to be on the safe side say it took quite some time to form because things were expanding so very quickly right after the Big Bang that was 13.8 billion years ago. The average approach speed in that 10 billion years was only half what it is now: 1.5050E5m/s. Add the distance it would travel in 10 billion years 4.21962E22m||4.460142E6ly. Add that to the 2.537E6ly it is away now, and that works out to 7.02014E6ly.

One of the farthest objects in our “local group” is the NGC300 galaxy - it is now 6.85000E6ly||6.47997E22m distant. By its Redshift, it is moving away at 1.45000E5m/s. Again, presume it average velocity is only half that - because the Universe is expanding “at an ever increasing velocity”. So in 10 billion years, moving at 7.2500E4m/s the NGC300 galaxy would have moved away2.287926E22m||2.41834E6ly. So it would have been at a distance of 4.19204E22m||4.4308899E6ly 10 billion years ago.

So just compare them: 10 billion years ago M31 was approximately 7.02 million light years away and it fell towards us. The NGC300 object was 4.43 million light years away and it fell away from us. Does that make sense? Isn’t there a possibility we could be misinterpreting the Redshift||Hubble Constant business? That the whole Universe is a little bit more complicated than a Big Bang postulate that is both non-Relativity and non-Quantum Mechanics? Just try my paper Frequency Decay through Electromagnetic Radiation Absorption and Re-Emission by Inter-Galactic Dark Matter as an Alternate Explanation for the Hubble Constant at [http://www.scirp.org/journal/Pap...]. It begins my argument that the Genesis of our Universe took place considerably longer ago that 13.8 billion years ago, and that there is a Relativistic device for converting a pure energy environment into matter Schwarzschild objects. If you want a more detailed analysis of all of my theory and papers (published and non-published) the above one is as good place to start as any.

Source:

https://www.quora.com/If-light-can-travel-freely-through-space-why-isn-t-the-Earth-perfectly-lit-all-the-time-Where-does-all-the-light-from-all-the-stars-get-lost