![]() The paradox is commonly attributed to the German amateur astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, who described it in 1823, but Harrison shows convincingly that Olbers was far from the first to pose the problem, nor was his thinking about it particularly valuable. Kepler also posed the problem in 1610, and the paradox took its mature form in the 18th-century work of Halley and Cheseaux. According to Harrison, the first to conceive of anything like the paradox was Thomas Digges, who was also the first to expound the Copernican system in English and also postulated an infinite universe with infinitely many stars. The first one to address the problem of an infinite number of stars and the resulting heat in the Cosmos was Cosmas Indicopleustes, a 6th-century Greek monk from Alexandria, who states in his Topographia Christiana: "The crystal-made sky sustains the heat of the Sun, the moon, and the infinite number of stars otherwise, it would have been full of fire, and it could melt or set on fire." Įdward Robert Harrison's Darkness at Night: A Riddle of the Universe (1987) gives an account of the dark night sky paradox, seen as a problem in the history of science. Although he was not the first to describe it, the paradox is popularly named after the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers (1758–1840). Other explanations for the paradox have been offered, but none have wide acceptance in cosmology. ![]() The resulting microwave radiation background has wavelengths much longer (millimeters instead of nanometers), which appears dark to the naked eye and bright for a radio receiver. That model explains the observed non-uniformity of brightness by invoking expansion of the universe, which increases the wavelength of visible light originating from the Big Bang to microwave scale via a process known as redshift. The darkness of the night sky is one of the pieces of evidence for a dynamic universe, such as the Big Bang model. This contradicts the observed darkness and non-uniformity of the night. In the hypothetical case that the universe is static, homogeneous at a large scale, and populated by an infinite number of stars, any line of sight from Earth must end at the surface of a star and hence the night sky should be completely illuminated and very bright. ![]() Olbers's paradox, also known as the dark night sky paradox, is an argument in astrophysics and physical cosmology that says that the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe. Olbers's paradox says that because the night sky is dark, at least one of these three assumptions must be false. As more distant stars are revealed in this animation depicting an infinite, homogeneous, and static universe, they fill the gaps between closer stars.
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