I observed that the sky is pretty clear last night after a continuous rain which was there from the morning. From nowhere I suddenly wanted to set up my good old telescope (which I got as a gift from my father about 8 years back) just for fun. So I set it up in my balcony and started to stare at the sky. Well there were few clouds but I can still see the stars.

As I stared at the sky (rather stars) I had this very strange an funny question which has no direct answer, I asked myself, if we are looking at a star 1000 light years away is it possible that the star no longer exists? Is it possible that the billions of stars we are seeing in the night sky may have died long ago? There is pretty good possibility of sky being just an illusion for us.

Most of the stars in the universe are more than 1000 light years away from us. So actually the stars that we see now might not even exist at this time but we can still see it due to fact of the speed of light. Since the light we see from distant stars and galaxies took many years to get here, we have no timely data to know whether those objects still exist. The distances are just too vast. The conventional thinking is that stars can exist for billions of years before they consume all their available fuel and finally blow up or collapse so it’s reasonable to assume that they are still there but we can never really know for sure.

For example, a star called Betelgeuse might have already gone supernova, but we might not see it for the next few hundreds of years. :(

Is this reasonably accurate? If this is accurate night sky is just an illusion for human beings. Too bad.

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