When I saw the title I was like "This is so obvious, any 3 year old knows it" After a minute of starting watching it, I was like "Shit, I don't know shit"
More like "lol I know this stuff" then he goes "actually, it's not that, there's this other explanation" then when I go "ohhh that makes sense" he goes "actually, that's not it either, here's another explanation" then he does this three more times
I asked this question in my 8th grade science class. My teacher didn't have an answer. A few years later I asked my dad. We thought about it and this is the answer we came up with. I am so excited this video exists because I've been asking this question for years. Thank you.
Unless we figure out how to time travel. then they might see us looking at the dinosaurs. or perhaps we time travel to stop ourselves from time travelling, 1 + -1 style.
***** Although, because of the motion of the Galaxy/Solar System/Earth, time travel would have to include some way to account for literally everything in the universe, as well as a way to get to the earth to actually see it during that time, instead of just the point in space that earth is in the time you're travelling from. Furthermore, we would have to measure the speed and direction of everything in the universe also, to find where it was/will be or else we run the risk of traveling to a time during which the place that you are now was in fact occupied by some asteroid. This would likely result in the destruction of what is known as you, as all of the electrons/neutrons/protons that you are made up of would be scrambled among those that made up said asteroid, and this would cause the creation of new particles as all of the electrons ... etc mixed and combined in ways that neither your bod nor the asteroid had them in before. Basically, time travel would be extremely dangerous without a dizzying amount of math.
May be there is a lot less ultraviolet light than infrared? so when they redshift to visible spectrum, they remain not intense enough for us to be able to see it
It does. The quasars we see from almost 13 b light years away are radiating heavily in the UV and X-Ray spectrum but we still see them all red. And the backgound light is shifted even more, into microwaves. That's why the cosmic background is a microwave background which equals a temperature of 3.15 K or -270°C so all the light from the big bang reaches us as 3 K radiation.
Hold on a second! Wouldn't the redshifting get the ultraviolet radiation from distant stars and galaxies into the visible spectrum in a similar way? So what's going on there?
Well sure it's just that the range of visible is fairly small Red700nm-violet400nm. Redhift is just the measurement of the change in wave length of light that say a hydrogen atom emits divided by it's rest wavelength. So really the question is kind of irrelevant with the scales we are talking about anything close enough to be in the visible spectrum is to close to matter. skyserver.sdss.org/dr1/en/proj/basic/universe/redshifts.asp www.space.com/25732-redshift-blueshift.html science.nasa.gov/ems/09_visiblelight
You are right, but the ultraviolet radiation from even more distant stars gets redshifted even more. Therefore it too becomes infrared. So there is a zone where you can see the 'ultraviolet' light, but farther away, you can't.
Good question. This video is false and just a misdirection into Big Bang, etc. The reason the sky is dark is because density of light reaching us is low.
Well, you know a lightyear is the amount of distance light travels in one year, right? So if you look at a star 1 lightyear away, you get the image of the star with 1 year delay, since the light you just got started traveling 1 year ago. if a new star popped up 2 million years ago, but the distance between this star and our Earth is 1 million lightyears, we still need to wait 1 million more years for that light(the image of the star) to arrive. That is why we can't see a lot of stars that certainly exist. Light is so slow that it takes time to reach us. Also many stars' light is out of our visible spectrum. Kinda like how some animals can hear sound that is too high or low for humans to hear, there are light that only machines can see.
the reason its dark is because the universe is infinitely large and growing that the light from the big bang hasn't reached us yet but when it does the night sky will be light if that makes any sense to you if it don't forget everything that I just said
Yes. I saw a picture sometime (an artist's rendition I think, or maybe a simulation) that basically measured the strength and wavelength detection of the creature's (I think it was a lizard or chameleon of some kind) eyes and then took a picture of the night sky with those wavelengths, combined it with visible light (I think it sees in the spectrum we see, along with infrared) and vuala. You'd have to do some searching for it, but if I remember the article right, that sums it up.
You forgot one piece of the mosaic - there is actually a "border" beyond which we cannot see. It is where the expansion reaches the speed of light from us. The area of this sphere is said to contain all of the entropy information in our observable universe. There is no classic hard barrier, but the laws of physics make it so that we cannot ever see or get past it.
It means that, if we were able to see in a wider spectrum of light (e.g. infrared, ultraviolet, or more), we would see many other things that are invisible to our current capacities...
Actually you would have to wait a really long time! There would be stars that are far enough that light from them hasn't reached us yet!. The background radiation would be visible as well.. something. A lot depends on how we would actually perceive the radiation. I assume you assumed there was no atmosphere! :)
Tethloach Kingofreason Ehmmm. I may think you are wrong. The thing the haets up the earth is not the light, it is the infrared thingies. That we could see them doesn't mean there would be more of it and so the earth's temperature would stay the same. It would be a lot lot brighter, though.
Tethloach Kingofreason Not quite. The light spreads out. The further away we are, the less intense it actually is. nicolasiguaran You're close. So both infrared and "light" are the same thing here. *We* can see one and not the other. And thanks, my comment above was partly flawed. Updated! Also, we need the atmosphere for the earth to *stay* warm. Think of other planets or the moon. It can get quite warm during the day but then also quite chilly at night. The reason that happens to a lesser degree on earth is due to the presence of greenhouse gases(in the atmosphere).
Mohammed Ali Red shift is the same concept as when you hear a police car siren traveling away from you except in the form of light waves instead of sound waves.
Very cool video, but I think the main cause is the inverse square law: the intensity of the emitted light decreases with the square of the propagated distance. Because the stars are far way most of their light arrives with intensity below our eyes sensitivity threshold.
damn I wish I was brainy so I could understand this stuff. If they teached this in school id of listened all I remember doing in physics is connecting a fucking battery circuit to a few little bulbs
Could be worse + Slick Rick all I do in science is burn stuff ( ussually salt water or something else added to pure water that that dose or dose not dissolve in it ) to learn diffrent things like, why salt dosent evaporate or how to get clean water or somthing wired, I mean, dont get me wrong, you put fire into a lesson, I aint complaining.... unless I get burnt by the fire then ill be a little mad lol
BRAINGASMS!!! I love this stuff, it stimulates my brain somehow. Started to study again with 30 and I would recommend to others too who feel stuck in life or in their job and generally considers learning as a never ending process and enjoys it. Thanks to all the people who do this stuff (Vsauce, RSA, MinutePhysics, FightMediocrity, Brian Johnson, Elliot Hulse and so on) Any Recommendations refering to similar Videos? Education, Psychology, Self Development, ... would be apreciated.
It's that simple. It's something called the Oliver's paradox, which is still unsolved. It basically says, if there's an infinite number of stars, then why is there light in every direction you look?
a question .. if I'm on earth and you are on a planet one light-year away from me, and suddenly your planet explodes, but you're sending me a voice message in the exact time .. what reach to me first? your voice, or the light from the explosion?
It depends on how the voice message is being sent. If it is radio or any other form of communication that uses the electromagnetic spectrum, then my voice being cut off would happen at the exact same time as the explosion, since light and radio waves are both on the electromagnetic spectrum.
Benjamin Stewart true, but given that the sound was send in the form of a message transmitted using electromagnetic radiation shouldn't it take extra x time to encode & decode the message content back into sound (Voice) ?
This is awesome, I never thought that a certain wavelength light emitted from a moving star would actually appear as another wavelength to us I assume that is because of the Lorentz transformation... but if so shouldn't the wavelength actually "become" shorter relatively to us?
As space grows, the spaces between everything grows. This includes the space between different adjacent waves in a beam of light, essentially making the wavelength longer. Another thing is that as objects creating any sort of wave moves away from an observer, the individual waves are made farther apart, making the wavelength longer. What you're thinking about is *blue*shift, so named because when an object is moving toward an observer fast enough, any light released appears slightly blue because the individual waves are released closer together.
Stars that are super far away also become etremely dim by the time they reach earth so that our human eyes couldn't see them even if their light was in the visible spectrum. We would still need telescopes to see them anyway.
ERROR IN THIS VIDEO? "If we lived in an infinite, unchanging universe, the entire sky would be as bright as the sun." Excuse my english, but my small brain tells me that's not how it goes at all. In my opinion, the most important thing is ratio between bright objects empty (lightless) space. Emptiness wins - big time. I also think that - in this context - this is also the most important thing in real, expanding universe, and red shift effect starts to affect in VERY distant objects. If the red shift were the main reason, we should see dark red(ish), not black background. Feel free to correct.
OSOCO Yes? I agree in some part of your opinion. And that it is in the last part of it. We would see some kind of a dark reddish thing. Yeah, we will be able to see some dark reddish thing. But not the whole background of it. Because, As something gets redder, it gets more... well.. dark. And as it reach it's point where literally it's infrared. It would become, black. Because we cannot see it anymore. But if the theory was true, (The theory that I'm talking about is the Infrared thing.) Some animals like boas, will see the night with a lot of red stuff but not totally all. Because some far things are so infrared, that even animals that can see them, won't be able to see them. I hope you get my point.
Jemas Dilacan That's pretty much how I think. Anyhow, in my opinion there should be the the whole range of light (because of different red shift levels and distances) from white to invisible infrared added (mixed) TOGETHER, sum total being somewhere between orage and dark red to human eye. That's not the case, so 'emptiness explanation' seems to be WAY more important factor in blackness phenomenon. In that light (no pun intended) there can not be an entity percieving infrared, because of very small percentage of visible objects compared to emptiness in the first place. This is rather hard to explain with my great English skills, lol.
Jemas Dilacan 'Sum total' is probably wrong term. 'The result of mixed frequencies' may be more correct. "But I accept both as a factor. Do you?" Both factors are real and effective, but I don't agree with this: "If we lived in an infinite, unchanging universe, the entire sky would be as bright as the sun." That's because of 'emptiness wins' circumstance, thus we don't see the effect of red shift factor in the lack of enough light coming to us in the first place, let alone the dimmer light affected by the red shift.
It's not called Dark Matter because it's dark. It's called Dark Matter because it is utterly invisible across all spectra of light, only detectable by its gravity. Galaxies are formed at dark matter clumps, so if anything, all the gravity would bend light into galaxies, enabling viewers to see more light.
The atmosphere won't let infrared light past through into the Earth, that's the point of it. Hubble can take pics of it because it's in outter space. So if we were sensitive to infrared, we'd still see the night sky dark.
Couldn't it also be that the light coming to us from stars is pretty much parallel to our line if sight? It's like looking at a flashlight through a pin hole. The flashlight itself is bright but it's being restricted to parallel rays, much like the stars which are far away so we only see parallel rays. I think either way is a good explanation.
So if we had a way to travel really fast to another place far from earth and than look at a certain place on earth, we could see who commited a murder for example...
so to answer you question simply, yes. if you go one light year away from earth and if you could look at it with a telescope, the image you see is 1 year old. it looks like you are watching live events on earth (clouds moving and all) but it all happened one year before. thats just because light has a finite speed and it takes time for it to travel.
Yeah, as Carlos Grant said, 'if you go one light year away from earth and if you could look at it with a telescope, the image you see is 1 year old'. The only problem with doing it: it would only really work if we could instantly teleport one lightyear away, or if we could travel faster than the speed of light. Because we'd need to travel a lightyear away from the Earth faster than the light itself can get there. For example, if we have a race and you start a month earlier than I do, I'd need to drive much much faster than you are, otherwise I'd never catch up. The same sorta thing applies here. To see even a month into the past, we'd need to travel impossibly fast to catch up with the light that got sent out a month ago. It's still cool to think about though.
If a species on an other planet had a very massive telescope (like 4 light years across) and they were observing us from 65 million light years aways, they could theoretically see dinosaurs.
rai ZOR Not realy olber's paradox is based on asumptions that violates the conservation of energy. Some believe that big bang resolved a physical paradox, but there never was any to begin with.
These minute physics are so interesting. I don't understand why so many people don't like it, is it that they don't understand it? I personally thinks it's cool!
There's a simpler reason: The stars are too far away and not bright enough. Virtually all stars the naked eyes can see are in our own galaxy. Even the Andromeda galaxy, which is really close and consists of numerous stars, is barely visible. So the fact that star's aren't visible from the universe outside our own galaxy with the naked eye has barely anything to do with the reasons given.
That's not true. For exmaple, if we double the distance between us and a star, we will receive 4 times less light, however, it will take up 4 times less area of our vision, so since they both change at the same rate, when an object is moved away from us it only gets smaller in out field of view, but the brightness density stays the same. For example: if you place a computer screen far enough, you won't be able to see individual pixels, but you could still see the screen. and if you move it so far away you can't see the screen, you can stack screens on top of each other and to the side, and still see them, and if you leave no gaps, it will still have same brightness. This is both beautiful, and scary.
Oinikis It's an interesting argument. Disregarding speed of light and assuming an average star density, an infinite universe should look infinitely bright. I'm pretty confident that the following holds for our universe though: Earth is part of a larger galaxy. If you'd look outside the window of a spaceship at a suitable point far away from any galaxy inside the local group, you'd possibly see two faint dots in the entire sky and nothing else (Milky Way and Andromeda). If you'd move far away from the local group into intergalatic space, you'd see nothing at all. Complete and total blackness. And that even holds if you remain in an area of the universe with a high density in galaxies. Most of the space is located in great voids that are particularly empty. So if you move away from our galaxy you usually get into space ever and ever more devoid of stars by orders of magnitude. However, that doesn't really refute your argument. Since if, regardless of how far you go, the density of stars remains constant over sufficiently large areas of space (we're thinking truly vast areas of space though), it should still be true that the average perceived brightness should even be infinite (if I think correctly here). There is, however, also the speed of light taken into account. The farer you look the more you look into the past. Indeed you can see "light" from all directions in the form of background radiation as talked about in the video. So the distance you can see is in fact limited by the age of the universe times the speed of light.
Before digital TV, I used to love turning analogue TVs to static and just basking in the knowledge that I'm watching leftover signals of the big bang, populating throughout space in every direction. And also some random noise generated from Earthbound sources, for those pedantic enough to split hairs.
As we know space is expanding, the stars are moving away. And the farther they are from us the faster the stars travel. As it goes on and on it becomes redder and redder until we can't see it anymore (at least with a naked eye). That's why it's dark at night, Aman Dahiya. :) : D
Aman Dahiya Space is always expanding, and the stars are moving with it, and as space gets bigger, and the stars get further away, they become red. As all this happens, space gets bigger, causing the stars to get farther away, making them get redder, they go infrared, which the human eye cannot see.
Also factoring in the time between when you see a star and when a star is either created or when it dies. The blank spots may be home to stars that produce light which will never reach the human eye due to the long distance. And the stars that are there may have died long before humans came around but because they're so far away and the speed of light is so limited, the light those stars shone will be seen long after humans no longer exist.
The concept of dim-ness is all relative. Relative to the aperture of whatever's collecting the photons, what wavelength the thing is sensitive to etc. The video did a great job of explaining that. In many ways, night can be brighter than day. What we see revolves around *multiple* factors: distance, size, velocity, apparent/absolute brightness, and the wavelength it's emitting/reflecting.
I think Henry had been reading Isaac Asimov's classic story Nightfall when he came up with this topic. It's about a planet in a multiple star system that only sees the night sky for a few hours every 2000 years.
The idea is that if the universe is infinite, spacetime expands into itself. It's not that easy to visualize and I couldn't find a nice gif but here is a good video that helps: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-kV33t8U6w28.html But the same question can be asked for a universe with curvature. If the universe is not infinite, it would still have to expand into itself because there is no such thing as "outside" of the universe because outside refers to a position and position only exists within our universe because there is spatial dimensions.
+Jana Blahová Erm no not a good question, INFRARED doesn't mean you can see it, infrared is invisible to our eyes like the guy kept on saying in the video jeez
I believe that Cosmic Microwave Background isn't only beyond the stars but simply everywhere in space/time. Anyhow i think you've done a great video, I love it!!! :)
I can listen to your voice all day... You have great information in your videos, and since I have synethesia, your voice smells like the beach. And I love the beach.
More to do with the fact that as things get further away, the light emitted (or reflected) from anything, regardless of how big it is, spread out as the distance between us and 'it' increases exponentially (Google inverse square law). This is why things can seem brighter than others, when in reality, they're just closer. But you already knew that..... Asteroids etc are so sparse and photons so small, it's unlikely the two interact at all on the journey from there to here.
When stars ,galaxies moves away from us they are into red shift and the farther they move the more infrared they become below visible spectrum,therefore the sky in the night appears dark,even though there are so many stars.
you are the best teacher evey i have,, i like the way you explaine and drawing,, plz littel slow down so we undrestand better.. thanks again for everything
The cause is really more the intrinsic brightness of the objects we see and how far away they are. As light from distant objects gets to earth, it gets dispersed and becomes less bright by a factor of the radius squared. So, we can only see objects within our galaxy (and the Andromeda Galaxy and Magellanic Clouds, if you're in the southern hemisphere). Bringing up redshift isnt relevant for objects within our own galaxy. *Because* they're within our galaxy... But nothing within our own galaxy is getting redshifted enough to become infrared. And, Andromeda is actually moving towards us
I think it's because we are "evolve" to see specific light wavelengths which are from red to violet. I mean all of human ancestor who can see infrared or ultraviolet will suffer the disadvantages of bright night including discomfort to rest. So they must adapt the situation or their ability to survive reduced. I also think the theory of natural selection can apply the same way.
MinutePhysics is one of my favourite RU-vid channel. I have a request, please make a few videos on Electrodynamics. I'm unable to find my interest in this topic. I need better explainers, someone like you people. Thanks.
+Killer Hand Please don't comment just to start arguments, you obviously have no idea what electrodynamics is, and you are not in the position to tell others what to say.
shiny stars at the very furthest of distance emit IR light, we cant see that, it appears black. cosmic background radiation is IR spectrum as well, so the night sky appears mostly dark, besides the visible stars.
I believe that there may be 2 flaw in this video: As visible light red-shift to IR, UV light would red-shift to visible light. “No matter what direction you pick, you should always see a star or a galaxy, so the whole sky should be as bright as the sun”… the infinite sum of finite numbers (limit of a serie) may be a finite number, then, if this number is small enough (bellow how much you eye can pick up light), the sky may remain dark.
Not dimmer at the source. It is because the light has diffused,not sure if it is the correct word, (spread out). Therefore the light that reaches us has a lower concentration, again not sure on the wording. I could be entirely wrong but that is how I understand it.
