Why is the Night Sky Dark?

The answer to this question is not as simple as it sounds. You might say the night sky is dark
as the Earth rotates upon its axis and for some time, it faces away from the sun and hence,
the darkness. But what about the hundreds of billions of other suns in the universe which
still face us during the night? There are over a hundred billion universes in the visible
Universe and it is estimated that there are well over 200 hundred billion stars in our own
Milky Way!
Up till a century ago, astronomers believed that the Universe is infinite in age and size. This
assumption came with a problem though: the trouble with an infinite Universe is that no
matter where you look, you would see a star just like seeing trees all around in a thick
forest. But if this were the case, the whole night sky would be shining.
Let us explain it using simple mathematics: we know that the any object becomes fainter as
we move away from it and that the brightness reduces by 1/d 2, that is, an object twice as far
appears one-fourth as bright. Now let us consider shells around the Earth with the distance
between the Earth and the shells doubling with each consecutive shell. In our field of view,
we can observe four times the surface area of the second shell as compared to the first. This
means four times the number of stars than the first one. But as the brightness of the stars is
reduced, that too the by the same amount, we must be able to see the second shell with the
same brightness as the first one. This can be extrapolated for all the successive shells. This
basically implies that our whole field of view should be uniformly bright just like the day.
This question greatly troubled the scientists and came to be known as the Olbers’ paradox.
Why is the night sky bright then?
To solve this problem, scientists thought
of vast spaces of gas and dust clouds
blocking the light but then quickly
realised that if the Universe was in fact,
infinitely old, the light falling on these
clouds would heat them up and would
eventually force them to emit light with
the same intensity. Hence, that idea was
out. Then in 1848, an American poet
named Edgar Allan Poe happened to
solve this paradox in one of his essays,
Eureka, where he wrote:
“Were the succession of stars endless,
then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed
by the Galaxy - since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which
would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we
could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be
by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet
been able to reach us at all.”
Although, his writing was more of a literary work, it provided us with the solution, saying
that there hasn't been enough time for the light to reach us from the most distant stars.
Therefore, even though there might be some stars out there, we may not be able to see
them simply because light does not travel at infinite speed!
And also, on a more theoretical note, one can also say that as the Universe is expanding, the
light from a star would have to travel a greater amount to reach us. It means that a star
which was rather bright to us about a billion years, may not be so now as the light emitted
from that star has to travel a greater distance now and which causes its brightness to
diminish (in view of the inverse square law of brightness and distance as discussed above).
This solution of the Olbers’ paradox also disproves the static model of the Universe and
hence brought us into light regarding the expanding Universe!