An article · Nature & Wonder
Why Is the Night Sky Dark?
It sounds like a child's question. It is actually one of the deepest clues we have about the whole universe.
If the universe went on forever and had always existed, then everywhere you looked you would eventually meet a star, and the whole night sky would blaze like the surface of the sun. It does not. The darkness between the stars is trying to tell us something.
The dark is a clue
The night is dark because the universe had a beginning and is still growing. Light from the most distant places has not had time to reach us, and the stretching of space has dimmed much of what has. The empty black overhead is, in a sense, the shadow of time itself.
A good question looked after for long enough can hand you an entire cosmos.
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