Talk:Olbers's paradox: Difference between revisions

::What does that have to do with my question? [[User:Iago4096|Iago]]<font color="#aa1050">[[User_talk:Iago4096|2¹²]]</font> 21:37, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

:::It means that it looks the same brightness no matter how far from it you are; your distance controls how small it looks but not how bright it looks. If you insist on trying to understand it in terms of photons: the photons should not be interpreted as being emitted periodically, but rather randomly, at a given rate. Similarly, it does not emit photons along some fixed finite set of rays, but in all directions, randomly. Given this random process, the number of photons per second that reach your eye from any star (given a fixed value of its surface brightness) is proportional to the area of the sky that it covers from your viewpoint, but does not otherwise depend on the distance to the star. So if you see a star in every direction you look (far enough away in that direction), you would see the whole sky at the surface brightness of a star (the same brightness that we see the surface of the sun). —[[User:David Eppstein|David Eppstein]] ([[User talk:David Eppstein|talk]]) 21:47, 23 November 2016 (UTC)