Effects of Far Away stars.?

Question

While the Sun undoubtedly impacts us every second (in ways both seen a positive and negative), what effect is imposed on us by the energy of those other stars light-years away?

While it does take longer for their energy to reach us, it is undoubtedly arriving here (no matter how delayed); as such does the heat, light, magnetic waves, radio waves, ect, have any notable impact on us whatsoever? What about their gravitational pulls, no matter how far away?

Thank you in advance for your answers, I have been able to find little online about this (though I may be asking Google the wrong question).

Answer 1

The Sun is 109 times the diameter of the Earth and located only 93,000,000 Miles from it.

The nearest star, other than our Sun, is 4.5 Light years away.
One Light Year is roughly 6 Trillion Miles so that distance is 27 Trillion Miles...
27,000,000,000,000 Miles.

Radiation, be it light, Xrays, or Gamma Rays or
Gravitational forces, they all diminish with the square of
distance from the source. As a result, the effects of
anything from other stars is very much attenuated by
the time those forces impact on the Earth.

Other stars within our Galaxy are located up to 1100 Light Years from us, so their effects upon us are even more reduced, and essentially are non existant. What would affect us might be some huge explosion of a nearby star which created a huge cloud of debris flying through space in all directions. Some of that debris might come our way after a long period of time and impact upon the surface of the Earth.

Answer 2

Up to about 150 light years astronomers use parallax. Here is how they do it. They measure carefully the position of a star against the position of other stars nearby (nearby, in the sky that is). Six months later they do the same. If the position of the target star changes with respect to the others, and they can determine which of the others have not changed with respect to each other and are much further away, then the angular change is put into the formula tangent (a/2) = distance/r, where a is the angle they measure and r is the radius of the orbit of the earth. (They measure the angle using the diameter of the orbit of the earth, so for the equation they must take one-half the diameter). For stars farther than that they must estimate the luminosity of the star, using its stellar type (from the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram) from it's spectrum, and estimate distance using it's apparent brightness using the inverse-square rule. If there is a lot of dust between us and the target star then this method is subject to large error. Galactic and intergalactic distances are estimated in two ways. The first is by use of the redshift, in which distance is (said to be) proportional to velocity of recession. The second is to watch for supernovae or novae, which have a tendency to exhibit approximately the same luminosity for each type, again invoking the inverse square rule for luminosity decrease in a given distance. Obviously the parallax method is more accurate for nearby objects, but the others are so far away that small errors do not mean much.

Answer 3

Technically, the gravity from every star in the universe is tugging on you.

However, the force of gravity (like most other forces) spreads out spherically as you get further from the source. A star only has so much 'stuff' (heat, light, gravity, etc) and the intensity decreases as you spread it over a larger surface area.

Surface area can be found by the formula 4(PI)r^2, so the intensity of the gravity field is weakening pretty quickly. The gravity of every star in the universe is affecting you, but the affect is very small compared to the force of gravity from the Earth, Sun, Moon, etc.

Besides being very small to begin with, the force of gravity from stars and galaxies on one side of you tend to be cancelled out somewhat by the stars and galaxies on the opposite side of you. It winds up being somewhat similar to being inside a hollow Earth - if all of the mass existed on the surface of the Earth and the Earth were hollow inside, a person inside the shell would feel no gravity at all since all of the forces cancel out.

Since the stars and galaxies are all different distances from us instead of being organized in a sphere, their forces probably don't quite cancel out and the imbalance could theoretically indicate the Earth's location within the universe (if we had incredibly sensitive measuring devices, understood dark matter, dark energy, etc)

Answer 4

The immediate effect is negligible, but the cumulative gravity of the Milky Way causes our solar system to orbit the center of the galaxy. A large part of that attraction is not stars but the black hole at the center of the galaxy. At larger scales, hypothetical mass called dark matter is the dominant force. Gravity holds our galaxy in the Local Group of galaxies, and has put the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy on a collision course. Our Local Group is in turn being pulled toward the center of the Virgo Supercluster, and the whole supercluster is being pulled toward an unknown mass called the Great Attractor.

Answer 5

Nothing of importance and most effects are hardly noticeable UNLESS it would be a nearby supernova or magnetar or a gamma ray burster in the galaxy which happens to beam directly at us. None of this is likely and every one of us is much more likely to die in a car accident than be affected by any of these rare cosmic events.

Gravitation you can forget about completely. The most sensitive physics experiment on Earth, LIGO, has not been able to detect any gravity waves so far. And trust me, they are looking very hard.

Answer 6

Distant stars, or rather supernovae, are the source of cosmic rays. As cosmic rays slam into earths atmosphere they can fuse with oxygen and nitrogen to form other elements. Carbon 14, for instance, is formed when a neutron (one type of cosmic ray) slams into a nitrogen nucleus. Carbon 14 is radioactive but you can´t really say it has any big effect on life on earth.