if you get on the other side of the sun, would space be dark or light?

Question

because if the sun gives that much light, and the sun IS a star, then why is space dark if there are stars all around you?

yes, el. tuco butt face, i do know how big space is. i just didn't think about that. i asked a question. i wanted an answer. not an insult you idiot. thank you everybody else who isn't like this butt

oh, and nikki, the sun is not very bright at all actually, there are billions of stars way brighter and bigger.

Answer 1

The sun is spherical and radiates light in all directions and you can watch this every year as the Earth rotates around the sun, hence going to the other side of the sun. But the question is space dark or light is different. Space by definition is a void of nothing a has no visible light. Modern theories of physics say that there is energy call dark energy, and this may be present in all space. But energy is moving and changing all the time.
So I say dark. because the light photons move or convert all the time.

Answer 2

Technically space is not dark at all, it's just that you don't have anything for the light to reflect off of. If you were just floating on the other side of the sun wearing your spacesuit, you could easily look at yourself and notice that you show up just the same way as you would on earth (assuming the same distance). Technically you would be even brighter because more of the suns rays would be hitting you without that pesky atmosphere getting in the way.

In fact, it would be SO bright where you are floating, you wouldn't be able to see the stars at all... Imagine if you will, all those stars in space are all around us, in all directions. When the sun comes up in the morning, the stars don't "run and hide", they are still up there, it's just that they can't compete with the light from the closest star, our own sun. So all those times you watch a spaceship flying through the solar system in the movies, and you see a rich field of stars, that's just a special effect. The only way the people in the ISS or the space shuttle can ever see stars is when the earth itself blocks all the light from the sun.

Space, it tends to be counterintuitive, but if you remember that it follows all the same rules as here on the earth, it's just very very different, it all makes sense.

Answer 3

Every six months the earth is on the other side of our sun. As you notice the days and nights are pretty much the same except you can see different sets of constallations and stars and the season has changed.

Your second question about why space is dark is known as "Olbers' Paradox. (Heinrich Olbers was a German astronomer who popularized discussion of this subject in 1826.) "

"The reason why space is dark even though there are stars all around us is Most modern cosmologists have settled on two theories to account for the darkness. The first one states that red shift (see Echo and Doppler Shift), which indicates that space itself is expanding, decreases the amount of light reaching us. The other explanation -- generally considered the main one -- is that the universe is not infinitely old. If it were, the sky would in fact be infinitely bright, because light from every point in the universe would have had time (eternity) to travel to every other point. As far as we know, there is no edge of the universe, only an edge of time. The finite age of the universe limits how much light we see."

See: http://science.howstuffworks.com/question691.htm

Answer 4

The other side of the sun is also light. That is why we can have daylight 365 days out of the year. Because the earth rotates around the sun in one year, and not one of those days has the sun failed to shine (except if its cloudy, but that's not the sun's fault).

The problem with there being so many stars is that brightness falls off at 1/r^2. That means that if you were 10 feet away from a lightbulb, it's 1/100 times as bright as if you were 1 foot away. Now instead of being 10 feet away, you're a billion feet away.

That makes it almost infinitely less bright. Luckily for us, the sun is bright enough that being so far away still makes it pretty gosh darn bright looking. But we're MUCH too far from the other stars for that same brightness to come through.

Answer 5

The other stars are millions of light-year away. This is one of the first clues to the ancients as to why that exact scenario didn't happen.

EDIT:

I don't believe it has anything to do with reflections. If you stood on pluto, even facing the sun, you wouldn't be able to see much, and the sun will look like a dim point in the day sky (Pluto's day).

Think about it like this: if you look at a lawn sprinkler, the droplets get more and more dispersed the further you go from the nozzle. Much is the same for photons leaving the surface of the sun. As they depart the sun's surface, there is a high level of concentration of photons, and then they zing away. At great distances, they are so disbursed that you will barely find any. You might run across some from another star, but still not very many, not enough to talk about reflections.

But Catholic Girl, try not to be offended by people's posts. Not everyone means to insult others. Sometimes it just sounds like it. Personally, for intelligent questions, I never try to offend anybody...but sometimes (for me anyway) I come across as sarcastic, but I would never try to insult anybody. I know you weren't speaking directly to me, but just in general, not everyone wants to be insulting. I read that guy's post, it didn't seem all that bad to me. He just didn't have anything else to add.

Answer 6

The reason why is because at the other side is still planets, which are spinning around the sun. I'm afraid to say the sun surroundings are the orbits of all the planets.

If you mean the side of the other planet, there will be more stars, and Andromeda galaxy if someone spotted, a twinkled light will be seen because of the distance.

Answer 7

Because space is a vacuum. There's nothing there to get lit up. Just like if you shine a flashlight in an empty room; the only part that gets lit up is a small circle where the light hits the wall. The air in between doesn't light up.

Nebulas, though, do get lit up by stars. We have some lovely photos of them from the Hubble.

Answer 8

It's the distance between the stars -- even the closest one to us, Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 light-years away, hardly enough to be more than a blur -- that makes space dark. Even if you get on the other side of our sun, space would still be dark because only your perception has changed, not the star or space itself.

Answer 9

Light travels in a straight line to your eye. The light you see that makes rooms and other light colored areas appear lit also does so (as a reflection), but from multiple points.
Far out in space, there is nothing to reflect the light from stars; so, empty space appears dark.

Answer 10

Think of a giant auditorium with only two exit lights, one at either end. Not much light in the middle.