Are Most Stars we see at night not there anymore?

Question

I was talking to my brother one night and he was telling me how most or a lot of stars we see are exploded by now but we still see them because of how long it takes for the light to travel here.

Answer 1

Yes for most of the stars .

let me explain .

we see things as light is reflected from the object to our eyes.

so , if the things is light years away , the light travels slower from the object to our eyes .

so actually the object is not there but we still see it there.

Answer 2

yeah budy coz whn a star explodes several phenomenon occur.one of them might b production of huge amount of light dat could last for long tym.this depends on type of planet that explodes

Answer 3

I don't know about "most" but yes, there are probably a lot of stars that you see that aren't actually there anymore, just because we'll see the light of them being there for many years to come.

Answer 4

Yes, some of them are probably dead and gone, but not the majority.

Isn't that fascinating? If only we could go faster than light, we could travel far enough away from our planet and intensely magnify a reflection of the light coming off of it and watch history unfold.

Answer 5

Actually no, hes wrong.

The stars we can see with the naked eye are very close (less than 100 light-years), and nearly all of them are middle aged. It is concievable that some of the very old ones have initiated supernova, but in the span of 100 years, this is extremely rare.

Once you start viewing through a telescope however, his quote is more accurate. I guarantee you that right now, thousands of stars whose light is travelling towards us have begun the supernova stage. However, by no means is it common, and most certainly not is it true that most stars have exploded. The universe is as pretty in any one location as it is right here.

Answer 6

no most of what you see is NOT gone.... you can't see the invidividual stars of other galaxies with the naked eye, and only at those extreme distances would the light really be out of our reach (conceivably anyways).... the life cycle of a star lasts billions of years.... and we can easily see when a star is close to death, and most of the stars we see in our galaxy aren't even close to death (by our standard of time anyways)

the light you see coming from them, is still being produced as we speak....

Answer 7

This is a myth. The lifetime of stars is billions of times longer than their distance in ight years from us. Virtually all the stars we see in the sky are within a few thousand light years of us, which is just a brief instant in their life histories. They are virtually all still there and unchanged in that short a period.