Can the naked eye see into outer space.?

Question

when you look into the sky at night, are you actually looking at stars, or just the light shining off them.

Answer 1

Oh Yes! Just look up.
The Astronomer Fred Hoyle had a great line; Outer space is not that far away. You could drive there in less than an hour.

If you could drive your car straight up, of course. But Space begins where our atmosphere stops, it's that close! (In fact, it could be argued that some of the earliest 'space flights' never really left the atmosphere, but that's being pedantic!
To answer the detail part of your question - yes, you are indeed seeing the light generated (not shining off, that implies relfection) by the stars - which is why looking into the sky at night is looking into a time machine! The light hitting the retina of your eye left the star year ago - sometimes hundreds or thousands of years ago. The star itself may well no longer exist. Amazin, aint it?

Answer 2

Yes, looking into the night sky you are looking into space, and, amazingly, back in time. Light travels at phenomenal speed(186,000 miles per second) and astronomers measure the distance to stars in light years(1 light year is light from a star that has taken a year to reach us). So for a star that is 100 light years away from us, we are seeing it as it was 100 years ago. If you see something that looks like a fuzzy patch, it could be a galaxy, and some of these galaxies are so big they would make the Milky Way look puny.

Even looking at our local star, the Sun, it's 93million miles from us so it's light takes EIGHT minutes to reach us. The moon's light take just a few seconds.

Answer 3

Yes the naked eye can see into space! But the light that you see from the stars are actually millions of years old because the light from the star is still traveling.

Answer 4

If you can see the stars then you are looking into outer space. Everything that you can see, your computer for example, you can see either because it has light shining from it or light is being reflected from it; so yes, you are actually looking at stars.

Answer 5

Seeing something is exactly the same thing as seeing the light coming from that thing. In the case of stars, the light is coming from inside the star. This is true of lightbulbs as well---when you see a light bulb that is turned on, you see it in the light it generates. When you turn the light bulb off, you see it in reflected light. When you see the planets or the moon, you see them in reflected light from the Sun. When you look at the Sun, you see it in the light it is emitting. The stars are the same as the Sun, only further away.

The Sun, the planets, and the stars are all in "outer space", so yes, when you see them you are seeing into outer space.

Answer 6

When you look into the sky at night, you are looking into space. You are also looking back in time, as the light that you are seeing takes thousands of years to travel from the stars to your eyes.

Answer 7

You are seeing the light that is traveling at the speed of light towards the earth. You are not seeing the stars themselves. Or, you are not seeing the stars in real time. Can the naked eye see into outter space ? .. Yes.. but not very far and not very well.

Answer 8

When you look at anything what is actually happening is the light is traveling from the object right into your eye and striking light detectors in your eyes called rods (and cones for color).

All light headed in our direction, assuming it isn't intercepted by anything and can make it here before we expand out of it's reach, actually does make it here, whether you can see it or not. The eye is not sensitive enough to detect a lot of though it may be in the visible part of the spectrum and thus when these low amplitude photons enter our eye they go undetected by us. Light "spreads out" the farther it gets from the source. Kind of like an expanding shell, and thus becomes dimmer.

Telescopes work by collecting up this light and "condensing" it to make it bright enough for your eye to detect.

So you actually aren't doing anything more than pointing your eyes and letting the light flow in.

Answer 9

no those are real stars. Actually, you can see about 2 million light years or so with your naked eye if the object is large enough. And because it takes several years for light to travel to us, we can view stars that are dead right now sometimes.

Answer 10

When you look at anything all you actually see is the light that is either reflected from it or generated by it. So, yes, you are seeing the light from stars many, many light years away.