Olbers' Paradox
If the universe is infinite and full of stars, every line of sight should end on one. So why is the night sky dark?
1610 (Kepler), 1744 (de Chéseaux), 1823 (Olbers)17 min read
German observational astronomy
Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers
1758 – 1840
Bremen physician who observed the sky from the top floor of his house after his patients were seen. He discovered the asteroids Pallas (1802) and Vesta (1807) and devised a still-used method for computing cometary orbits. His 1823 essay "Ueber die Durchsichtigkeit des Weltraums" restated the puzzle of the dark night sky and proposed that interstellar matter absorbs the missing light — an answer now known to be wrong, attached to a question that has carried his name ever since.