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No Stars
Name: william b skrobutt
Status: N/A
Age: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: 1993 - 1999
Question:
Is there a part in space where you can't see a star with the human
eye?
william b skrobutt
Replies:
I think that you can answer your own question by looking at a star
map, if I understand the question. Most bookstores have them.
J Lu
I don't really know how a star chart would answer this, so I guess
that J Lu and I read this question two different ways. I can think of two
situations for not being able to see any stars with the naked eye. One is:
you're too far away from any stars to see any. There are surely vast regions of the universe, in intergalactic
space, where no stars may be seen. (Every star we see at night is in our own
galaxy; I have read that the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest galaxy to ours, may
be seen as a faint, fuzzy patch of light in the night sky [I've never seen it my self], but no
individual stars from that galaxy may be seen. Thus, it seems reasonable to me
that one could be far enough away from all of the "local" galaxies that none of
their stars could be seen.) The second situation: something in your environment obscures all
starlight. This would certainly be the case if you were on the surface of a
planet with permanent thick clouds, like Venus or Jupiter, or merely with a
deep, hazy atmosphere like Uranus or Neptune. And I suspect that there are dust clouds in our galaxy that do not
allow starlight to penetrate completely into their interiors.
RC Winther
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Update: June 2012
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