Why is space black ? why isnt space uniformly illuminated?

Question

why is space not uniformly bright. The source of the light the sun is out there. When we recieve light during the day. Light so bright on the surface why isnt the space as bright ? got any ideas??

Answer 1

not much to reflect light off of

Answer 2

Space is a vacuum, there no objects to react with photons.

Answer 3

The reason why the sky is blue is because the atmosphere acts like a prism, bending the blue light down towards us making the sky appear blue.

In space, there is no atmosphere, no nothing to bend the light to make it appear uniformly illuminated.

Plus we can see the moon cause the sun's light reflects off of it.  There are not enough reflective material in space to reflect the star's energy into space in such a way that it makes it appear uniformly illuminated.

Answer 4

why is the inside of your closet dark when your bedroom's light is on?

the door is closed.

sheeeesh.

there's like dust and stuff in space.

Answer 5

What you are referring to is called "Olber's Paradox" and is discussed here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olber%27s_p...

Answer 6

For a blind every thing in the world is balck

DON'T MIND

Imean

The colour of evrything is decided by the light wavelenth reflectd by the same thing

As in day sky look blue and in night it looks black

It depend upon what ever light is coming from that thing

as space does not have any atmosphere so no light refect from any thing that why it looks like black

A thing reflecting no light will be look black

Take a exapmle

You took a   YELLOW cloth and put is room having only blue light  its look green

Please try it

I think my answer will be chjoosen best by you

Answer 7

for that to happen, there would have to be matter in space for the light to reflect off of. obviously, there isnt.

Answer 8

The Sun is just an insignificant little star in our galaxy, the Milky Way which contains more that 100 billion stars!

Answer 9

The question was already asked some centuries ago. Someone then came with the idea that the universe is not endless otherwise there would be an endless number of stars in the sky and it would be uniformly illuminated, as you say.

However today we know that even if we can't exclude totally an infinite universe, our observable one is limited to its horizon, i.e. the distance from which light can reach us at the speed of light. In the expanding universe, anything further away from that will never be seen.

In any case, when we look at the sky, we truly see in four dimensions: three spacial ones plus time. Because the farther away we see, the farther away in time we see.

This is why the cosmic microwave background, which is the left over of the big bang, is seen coming from all directions in the sky. That's right, the big bang is not a point in space but a sphere around us. Strange, isn't it?