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Asked by rowanisspurs8 to Shawn, Martin, Grant, Amy on 18 Mar 2013.
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Grant Kennedy answered on 18 Mar 2013:
It’s not actually black like a piece of coal, it’s black because most places that you look in the night sky don’t have a sufficiently bright star in them, so you just get the absence of light.
The fact that the night sky is dark was actually pointed out to be odd if the Universe goes on forever and has stars spaced out more or less evenly throughout, it’s called “Olbers’ paradox”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradoxThese days we don’t think that the universe goes on for ever (it started with the Big Bang and is still expanding), so the paradox isn’t a problem any more!
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Amy Tyndall answered on 20 Mar 2013:
On Earth, light from the sun is scattered by the atmosphere in an effect known as ‘Rayleigh Scattering’ – here, the bits of light with shorter wavelengths (blues) are scattered more than those at longer wavelengths (reds), and so this is what we primarily see as a blue sky. At night, there is no sunlight to scatter in the atmosphere, and so we see this as the colour black. This is why it is always a black night sky on the Moon, for example – there is no atmosphere to scatter the sunlight into our eyes to make us see a colour!
Comments
eminem01 commented on :
Space may be black because the sunlight and starlight does not have anything to bounce off
aliahana commented on :
it isnt too black, it is a bit dark purple-ish blue
eminem01 commented on :
Yeah it isnt completely black but it is like grey,blue-ish type colour! 🙂
Amy commented on :
You’re right, it may not be 100% black, because there will always be *some* particles of light hitting your eyes (especially from Earth). Have you ever been somewhere completely dark back home, away from light pollution?