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The Olbers paradox, described by the German astronomer Wilhelm Olbers in 1823 but known earlier, is the statement that in an infinite universe the night-sky should be bright. If the universe is assumed to be infinite, containing an infinite number of uniformly distributed luminous stars, then almost every line of sight should terminate eventually on the surface of a star. Because of this, almost every point in the sky should be as bright as the surface of a star. This reasoning was advanced to support the idea that the universe (or at least the part of it which contains stars) must be finite in extent, but this argument is incorrect. |
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The Olbers paradox, described by the German astronomer [Wilhelm Olbers]? in 1823 and earlier by Johannes Kepler, is the statement that in an infinite universe the night-sky should be bright. If the universe is assumed to be infinite, containing an infinite number of uniformly distributed luminous stars, then almost every line of sight should terminate eventually on the surface of a star. Because of this, almost every point in the sky should be as bright as the surface of a star. This reasoning was advanced to support the idea that the universe (or at least the part of it which contains stars) must be finite in extent, but this argument is incorrect. |
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