can anyone tell me why space is dark? there is nothing to stop the sun from making it bright is there?

Answer 1

because there is nothing for the light to reflect off.

Answer 2

If you stand in an aircraft hanger (with the lights off) with a hand torch, it is still dark in most of the hanger. Only the area just around the torch is illuminated.

The same principle applies to space. It is vast, absolutely huge and although the sun is big, it's light will only stretch so far. If you were standing on Pluto, the sun would look like a tiny speck in the sky, only slightly larger than all the other specks around it and the 'day' would be as dark as night.

Answer 3

As several people have said, space is dark because there's nothing to reflect light in it. But no one has pointed out that our Sun is a single tiny insignificant pinprick of light in the gigantic vastness of space, and can only light up the planets and stuff in its immediate neighbourhood. Travel more than a few hundred light years, and the Sun wouldn't be visible to the naked eye, and the universe is billions of light years in size.

Answer 4

This is known as Olber's Paradox. If the universe contains an infinite number of uniformly distributed stars then the night sky should be as bright as the Sun.

I'm too lazy to type the answer so follow the links below.

Answer 5

Space in general is dark because it is a load of nothingness. For space to seem light there has to be something to reflect the sun's light into our eyes.

Answer 6

Space is dark because the background temperature in space is only 3 degrees Kelvin. The wavelengths emitted by that temperature are way down in the infra-red.
We see the sun because it has a (surface) temperature of about 5500 Kelvin.
That produces wavelengths which span the infra red, through the visible range and into the ultraviolet.

Answer 7

well, when you're in space, there is nothing to reflect the light, and so you can't see it. Everything that has colour reflects light, even like air. As there is none of this in Space, you get no reflection, and so no light. Black is the absence of light.

Also, there are areas of space so far away from any stars that they would not be lit up anyway.

Answer 8

space is dark because, although there is light being given directly by the sun, there is nothing for it to brighten up, for instance, if you have a dark room and shine a lamp through the air it may light some dust in the air, making a beam of light, there is no dust or anything in space for the sun to light up, thats why it is dark in space

Answer 9

Exactly. NOTHING is stopping the sun from making empty space bright. Without an atmosphere, there is nothing to reflect the sunlight back to the observer.

Answer 10

There are theories out there that say dark matter composes the universe, and this is why most of space is black, but no one has proved it and research is still being done.

But to answer your second question, the Sun (and other stars) won't light "space" up itself . Light is an invisible electromagnetic energy wave, made up of photons, which we can't see normally. What we call "light" is when these photons strike an object, the object absorbs some of the wavelengths and reflects it, making it colorful, and when the reflection hits our eyes our brain interprets this as "light". So space cannot be lit up in this manner, because there is nothing there for the light to reflect off of. When it does reflect off of planets, we can see them because of this same idea, but blank space cannot be lit by itself.

Answer 11

You can see things because light reflects on it. Or, like stars (suns), when they emit light. When there is nothing that light can reflects on, it looks like there's no light. On the other hand, the sun emits light which reflects on the moon and other planets in our solar system, so we can see them.