Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Olbers's paradox says that because the night sky is dark, at least one of these three assumptions must be false. Olbers's paradox , also known as the dark night paradox or Olbers and Cheseaux's paradox , is an argument in astrophysics and physical cosmology that says the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and ...
Olbers monument in Bremen by Carl Johann Steinhäuser (1850) Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers (/ ˈ ɔː l b ər z /; German:; 11 October 1758 – 2 March 1840) was a German astronomer. He found a convenient method of calculating the orbit of comets, and in 1802 and 1807, discovered the second and the fourth asteroids Pallas and Vesta.
Olbers' paradox (the "dark-night-sky paradox") was described by Thomas Digges in the 16th century, by Johannes Kepler in the 17th century (1610), by Edmond Halley and by Jean-Philippe de Chéseaux in the 18th century, by Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers in the 19th century (1823), and definitively by Lord Kelvin in the 20th century (1901); some ...
The expansion of space summarized by the Big Bang interpretation of Hubble's law is relevant to the old conundrum known as Olbers' paradox: If the universe were infinite in size, static, and filled with a uniform distribution of stars, then every line of sight in the sky would end on a star, and the sky would be as bright as the surface of a ...
1720 – Edmund Halley puts forth an early form of Olbers' paradox (if the universe is infinite, every line of sight would end at a star, thus the night sky would be entirely bright). 1729 – James Bradley discovers the aberration of light , which proved the Earth's motion around the Sun, [ 72 ] and also provides a more accurate method to ...
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
Olbers' paradox: Why is the night sky dark if there is an infinity of stars, covering every part of the celestial sphere? GZK paradox : Extreme-energy cosmic rays (like the Oh-My-God particle and several others after it) have been observed that seem to violate the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin limit , which is a consequence of special relativity .
However, the weakening is not sufficient to actually explain Olbers' paradox. Many cosmologists think that the fact that the Universe is finite in time, that is that the Universe has not been around forever, is the solution to the paradox. [7] The fact that the night sky is dark is thus an indication for the Big Bang.