If the sun is bright then y is outer space dark?

Question

These are the questions that haunt me!

Answer 1

No matter how bright the sun is, you can only recognise the light that falls into your eyes.

Answer 2

The night sky is dark because the universe is finite in age and it is expanding.

Answer 3

because the sun in the Earths atmosphere is reflected by dust and gases

in outer space there is almost nothing, its a vacuum

Answer 4

(reflect)

Hi,

It's simply that there is so little matter in the vacuum of space that light has nothing to bounce off from, so it seems darker.

That's all.... nothing more.

Answer 5

The sun, although very bright, can't illuminate much out of our solar system. Also, there are very few particles in outer space to reflect light off of that would be visible to us (i.e. dust, air molecules).

Answer 6

There isn't anything in space to reflect light.

Answer 7

A common misconception about space (fueled by sci-fi depictions of space as a lonely place)  is that, if you were to be there, hovering around in Earth Orbit, everything around you would be dark.  

If you were in Earth orbit (lucky you), and the Earth were not blocking the sun, everything you'd see around you would be bright as day- even brighter, in fact, because there is no air blocking out the little bit of sunlight that the air blocks out.  

On Earth, the air reflects and refracts (bends) light so that we see light all over the sky.  (Air even glows, just a little bit.)  But this doesn't happen in space. Other than a little bit of space dust, and fine stream of gas particles flying outward from the sun, our solar system is pretty empty.    So, space itself would not seem bright because there is very little material for light to be reflected off of.  

If you're NOT in Earth orbit, out around Neptune, say, the sun's light would have significantly dropped off.   As you move outward from a source of light, its apparent brightness decreases by the square of its distance.  So, if you move twice as far away, the light will seem one fourth (1 divided by 2 squared) as bright.   Still, at the distance of Neptune, 30 times further away from the sun, the lighting levels are still many thousands of times brighter than a full moon.  (Even though they are 1/900th as bright as Earthly daylight.)  Things would seem dimmer, but it would still "feel" like broad daylight, because our eyes would adapt.  Scientists taking photographs with  the Voyager Space probes as they visited the outer planets had to take into account this diminishing light.

But, if we were to pick a random point in space- that is ALL of space- it would almost certainly be quite dark.    The space between the stars is extremely vast, and, any random point in our galaxy is likely to be extremely far from the nearest one.  So, space (at least within our own galaxy) would be as dark, on average, the darkest night sky- with stars and Milky-Way the only source of illumination.

However, if you take into account the space between galaxies, MOST space is very distant from the nearest galaxy as well.  In fact, most space is so far from the nearest galaxy, that, to the human eye, an average point in space would likely be completely and utterly dark- so far away from the nearest source of light, the fuzzy, distant galaxies, that nothing could be seen at all.

Answer 8

actually the sky seems blue i the morning because of the dispersion of violet light all around the sky by our atmosphere while there is nothing in the space to disperse.

Answer 9

About 90 % of the universe is dark matter. We are still not completely sure what dark matter is, but we do know that it makes up most of the universe, and it is MATTER, so it is there.

Answer 10

Space is simply so huge and empty that they human eye percieves it as dark because all the light from things liek the sun is dispersed through this huge vacuum.

Answer 11

Nothing for the sun to reflect off. If facing it in space you can still see it.

No air for it to reflect off like we have in our atmosphere.

Answer 12

When the the part of the earth you live at turns away from then sun, you are in a shadow of the sun's glare during what we call "night"...