why is it dark in outer space?

Answer 1

Darkness is the absence of light. There is a lot more space out there than there are stars, so there isn't enough light to cover all of space. Therefore, outerspace appears dark.

Answer 2

Now there are two answers to this.

If you go just into outer space - ie just outside Earth's atmosphere - then there is clearly about as much light coming from the sun as on Earth. But its dark. Why?

The reason is that there is nothing for the light to scatter off. So look towards the sun and its light, expose something to the sunlight and its light but look away and there is just dark.

The second part is "why is it dark when there are so many stars", and the answer to this is harder.

It is down to two things. Firstly, the universe had a beginning. Therefore, even if it is now infinite in size, you can only see stars in it as far back as its beginning - so you cannot see an infinite number of stars. Whats more, stars die, so some will be gone already. The seond point is that the universe is expanding, and this effectively dilutes the light that was there from the beginning.

Answer 3

Outer space has very few if any molecules to reflect or scatter light and in the absence of such scattering or reflection, light cannot be seen! So, the space looks dark unlike our atmosphere which appears blue from outer space because the sunlight is scattered by the air molecules and blue is scattered more because of its shorter wavelength. There is no such scattering in outer space except from celestial objects like moon, other planets, asteroids, comets, man made objects etc.

Answer 4

Since most space is a vacuum, there is not much for the light waves to reflect off. This is the same reason that the sky appears blue, the some of the light is reflected (blue) while others is absorbed, thus making the sky appear to be blue. Since there is no atmosphere in space, the light has nothing to reflect and therefore space appears to be black.

Answer 5

Because there is nothing that can absorb and reflect the sunlight (or light from other suns, for the matter) as most of outer space is just, well, empty space.

Answer 6

There are two reasons for this:

1) Stars, planets, moons, black holes, galaxies... only make up 1% of the universe's mass & energy. The remainder is "dark energy" which light can not detect correctly or pass through.

2) There is far more universe than actually bodies, so there isn't enough mass to fill it up.

Answer 7

Because these is no light reflected by anysubject for the vacuum in the space.
We see on earth because the light is reflected by all kinds of elements.

Answer 8

Because there is no light big enough to light it up, plus there is no atmosphere to keep the light in.