if the sun provides the earths light, then why is it not light in space even when space is closer to the sun?
83472
Space is technically a vacuum, hence void of any matter, invisible, see-through, like a very clean window! That's also why they placed the Hubble Telescope in orbit, out of the atmosphere.  The atmosphere seriously effects a telescope's ability to 'see' far into the universe.  It's essentially like looking through a dirty glass, because of all the particulate.\n\nSo,\nIn space no physical matter, no perception of light.  There is no air and/or physical matter for the light to bounce off of and around etc..\nIn other words, the reflections of light from objects creates the effect we perceive as light, or being lit-up.  \n\nAny solid will also be illuminated by the sun, in space. Proof of that is the moon, or any other planets visible by eye or telescope.  \n\nOur atmosphere (air is matter too) gives the appearance of being "lit" up, and all the solids on earth reflect that light, causing the effect of being "lit up"..\n\nTry this.  Go into a completely dark room, and turn on a good straight beam flashlight.  Can you see the particulate in the air?  The little lighted particles?  If they weren't there, all you would see is the white dot on the wall, that the light creates.  The reason you can put your hand next to the beam and still see it is from the reflection on the wall, AND the particle matter in the air, which causes light to stray onto your hand.  In this case it's more the reflection, but both aid in you seeing your hand..\n\nNow, take that HUGE flashlight in the sky *sun*, and apply that to what you have asked!
429788
The sun radiates light, thus it is emitted all around it. The moon reflects light from the sun, thus only the area facing the sun will be light.
909777
The brightness and apparent size of the Sun would be inversely proportional to the square of one's distance from it.  If you moved to 2000 miles from the Sun, about 1/50,000 the Earth's distance from it, the Sun would appear 2.5 billion times larger (in apparent area, but only 50,000 times wider) and brighter.  Hubble can't be moved close to the Sun because Hubble orbits the Earth at a fixed orbital radius.  In addition, Hubble and most other astronomical observation tools cannot be pointed at the Sun, because the light output would overwhelm their sensors.  Only a very few devices have been designed to observe the Sun.
195178
we dont see moonlight, the astronauts didnt see earthlight. what we and the astronauts saw was actually sunlight reflecting off of each (moon and earth). the moon gives off no light and all the lights on the earth would not make a very bright light if you were staring at the planet from the moon's surface.
23843
Nope, everyone has it wrong.  There is a secret and even though we know it, we still cannot find the answer.  The questions is, "What is light."  Nobody knows what light is.  There are many theories, but none can be verified.  If we knew the answer to this question, there would be literally no limit to what could be known and done.  At one time we had no idea what electricity was, but, once we found out it's priciples and properties, look what was done with appliances and computers.  No, apply similar advances if we knew the principles of light.  A trip to Alpha Centauri (the closest star) would take shorter time to reach than Mars does now.
583729
Sunlight is white, just like light bulb light. The moon is illuminated by sunlight just like your newspaper is illuminated by light bulb light when you are reading it at night. Both the Sun and the light bulb are really hot, but you don't touch either one, do you? Now clearly the sun is WAY hotter than a light bulb, but it is also WAY farther away. Both the Moon and Earth are very far from the sun and so they both get about the same amount of heat from the Sun, but we just are not close enough to get red hot.
365601
for the earth to get closer to the sun, the sun would have to grow or somehow become heavier
318033
day and night are caused by the fact that sunlight can only light half of earth at a time, and since earth is spinning, we are carried along and pass in and out of the sunlight.  earth has an atmosphere so we can see scattered sunlight even when we can't see the sun.  this is called twilight.
259241
Because there are no atmospheric particles for the light beams to bounce off of. You know how light bends(i.e. slows down) when traveling through water? Some light particles bounce off the water and others go through it. Its the same with the air. So that is why when you look at pictures of space you can actually see some things, because the light is bouncing off of them. The rest is void. Or mostly anyhow.
241158
The light from the sun goes about 186,000 miles in a second in a vacuum, which is a bit more than nine circuits of the earth.\n\n- - - -  - - - - - \n\nkirchwey caught me in another error:\n\nI did not previously bother to look up the circumference of the earth, but just winged it. Unfortunately, I misremembered/underestimated the earth's circumference by about 25%. \n\nThe circumference of the earth at the equator is about 24,901.55 miles. The speed of light in a vacuum is roughtly 186,282.397 miles per second, so the distance light travels in one second is equivalent to 7.480755 circuits around the earth at ground level at the equator, ignoring mountains and other orographic features.
21584
Only matter can reflect light, so outerspace isn't really dark, it's just an absence of matter. Dark matter, on the other hand, is actually dark. It's so dark, in fact, that it is impossible to see with the backdrop of space.\nKeep in mind, though, that the sky is blue not because air molecules are blue, but because of a refraction of light.\nEverything has to do with light...
143483
Sunlight from the Sun would have to reflect off something in space in order for that region of space not to appear black.  For example the Moon doesn't look black because Sunlight is reflecting off its surface.\n\nSpace is for the most part black since there is an absence of material that can produce or relfect light there.
147029
The moon gets in the way of our view of the sun.  Since coincidentally, the two disks (i.e., two-dimensional view of a sphere) have the same apparent size when viewed from the earth, the moon covers most of the sun, exposing the corona, which is normally invisible.  The corona is the thinner part of the sun which is not normally visible because of the glare from the main disc.\n\nHowever, here's an interesting question:  how far out in space would you have to be before looking at our sun (call him Sol), you would just see a bright star, and part of that star would be the earth?  That is, when we say "the solar system" to include ourselves and everything out to Pluto, an observer from far out in space would just say "Sol," and mean to include us.  Jefferson Starship sang, "We rode a bubble through the sun . . ."
174795
It is Olbers' Paradox.\n\nWhy isn't the night sky as uniformly bright as the surface of the Sun?  If the Universe has infinitely many stars, then it should be.  After all, if you move the Sun twice as far away from us, we will intercept one quarter as many photons, but the Sun will subtend one quarter of the angular area.  So the areal intensity remains constant.  With infinitely many stars, every angular element of the sky should have a star, and the entire heavens should be as bright as the sun.  We should have the impression that we live in the center of a hollow black body whose temperature is about 6000 degrees Celsius.  This is Olbers' paradox.  It can be traced as far back as Kepler in 1610, and was rediscussed by Halley and Cheseaux in the eighteen century; but it was not popularized as a paradox until Olbers took up the issue in the nineteenth century.
189981
The sun does attract the earth quite a bit. That's what keeps the earth orbiting it instead of flying off into space.
1136056
Because of its proximity to the earth, and because it is such a typical star, the sun is a unique resource for the study of stellar phenomena. No other star can be studied in such detail. The star closest to the sun is 4.3 light-years (4 × 1013 km/2.5 × 1013 mi) away. To observe features on its surface comparable to those that can be seen routinely on the sun would require a telescope almost 30 km (18.6 mi) in diameter. Such a telescope, moreover, would have to be put into space to avoid distortions caused by the earth's atmosphere.\n\n    The Sun is an ordinary G2 star, one of more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy.\n\n \n\n        diameter:    1,390,000 km.\n        mass:        1.989e30 kg\n        temperature: 5800 K (surface)\n                     15,600,000 K (core)\n   The Sun is by far the largest object in the solar system. It contains more than 99.8% of the total mass of the Solar System (Jupiter contains most of the rest). \n   The Sun is personified in many mythologies: the Greeks called it Helios and the Romans called it Sol. \n\n   The Sun is, at present, about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium by mass (92.1% hydrogen and 7.8% helium by number of atoms); everything else ("metals") amounts to only 0.1%. This changes slowly over time as the Sun converts hydrogen to helium in its core. \n\n \n\n   The outer layers of the Sun exhibit differential rotation: at the equator the surface rotates once every 25.4 days; near the poles it's as much as 36 days. This odd behaviour is due to the fact that the Sun is not a solid body like the Earth. Similar effects are seen in the gas planets. The differential rotation extends considerably down into the interior of the Sun but core of the Sun rotates as a solid body. \n\n   Conditions at the Sun's core (approximately the inner 25% of its radius) are extreme. The temperature is 15.6 million Kelvin and the pressure is 250 billion atmospheres. At the centre of the core the Sun's density is more than 150 times that of water. \n\n   The Sun's energy output (3.86e33 ergs/second or 386 billion billion megawatts) is produced by nuclear fusion reactions. Each second about 700,000,000 tons of hydrogen are converted to about 695,000,000 tons of helium and 5,000,000 tons (=3.86e33 ergs) of energy in the form of gamma rays. As it travels out toward the surface, the energy is continuously absorbed and re-emitted at lower and lower temperatures so that by the time it reaches the surface, it is primarily visible light. For the last 20% of the way to the surface the energy is carried more by convection than by radiation. \n\n    The surface of the Sun, called the photosphere, is at a temperature of about 5800 K. Sunspots are "cool" regions, only 3800 K (they look dark only by comparison with the surrounding regions). Sunspots can be very large, as much as 50,000 km in diameter. Sunspots are caused by complicated and not very well understood interactions with the Sun's magnetic field. \n\n   A small region known as the chromosphere lies above the photosphere. \n\n    The highly rarefied region above the chromosphere, called the corona, extends millions of kilometers into space but is visible only during eclipses (left). Temperatures in the corona are over 1,000,000 K. \n\n   The Sun's magnetic field is very strong (by terrestrial standards) and very complicated. Its magnetosphere (also known as the heliosphere) extends well beyond Pluto. \n\n    In addition to heat and light, the Sun also emits a low density stream of charged particles (mostly electrons and protons) known as the solar wind which propagates throughout the solar system at about 450 km/sec. The solar wind and the much higher energy particles ejected by solar flares can have dramatic effects on the Earth ranging from power line surges to radio interference to the beautiful aurora borealis.  \n\n   The solar wind has large effects on the tails of comets and even has measurable effects on t
585811
This question may be interpreted in two ways.  First, why is the sky not blue at night?  The answer for that is that the sky appears blue during the day because it scatters high energy sunlight.  The atmosphere scatters high energy starlight as well, but there isn't enough of that to make the sky appear blue.\n\nThe other interpretation is why is the sky not totally lit by stars?  That is actually a very important question that was pondered by famous astronomers.  It is called the Dark Night Sky Paradox, or Olbers' Paradox, and was contemplated by such notables as Halley and Kepler as well as the eponymous Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers.  If the universe is of infinite age (as was once assumed) and static, and the stars have had eternity to shine, shouldn't the sky be lit?  \n\nSome people hypothesized that the stars did not appear randomly in all directions.  (So the stars are arranged in straight lines with the Earth at the center so that starlight piles into intervening stars, and there are empty gaps?  Even before Hubble proved that "dark sky" is teeming with distant galaxies, that sounded stupid.)  Others said that dust in the way absorbed starlight.  But after an eternity of absorbing starlight, wouldn't the dust glow as well, and light up the night sky?\n\nThe fact that space is dark turns out to be proof in part that the Universe is not infinite, eternal, and static.  That in fact it had a beginning point in time and space and the Universe is changing.