Summary :: Is the sky we see in the night, real ? Does it really exist or is it just our imagination ? The answer is simple. The sky that we see, is unreal. It exists only in our mind, in our imagination. It is not real. It never was. Not convinced ? Okay, please find out the truth in this article.

Reading Time :: 10 minutes.

We have an amazing sky around us, filled with beautiful stars. Who did not look up in the night & count the stars ever in his childhood ? We live with the stars. Stars are believed to be eternal and immortal compared to the very small lifespan of humans. We placed the stars in our religious thoughts, we have even imagined many figures around the stars, we named the constellations, we made horoscopes based on the stars. Is it all just absurd & imaginary ? No. Each of the stars very much exists in reality, or did exist sometime in the past. But the view that we see from Earth is still unreal. It is merely an illusion or imagination. Sounds contradictory, right ? No problem, we will get into the details in a moment.

What is reality ? We assume that what we see is real. Seeing something is the single-most important criteria that defines reality (or pseudo-reality) for us. And light is the means by which an object becomes visible to our eyes. Hence, in the discussion of reality, light plays one very important role.

You have probably learned this in school physics. A recap first. Light travels at a very high speed. In just one second, light can travel around the globe… not just once, but 7 times. In fact light has the highest possible speed we know in our known universe. Still it takes more than 8 minutes to reach us from Sun. And in fact this is just a short distance compared to the gigantic size of the universe where we have all other stars. The distance between these stars is so huge that even light takes hundreds or thousands of years to reach us from the stars. These distances are unimaginably high. That is why we measure such distances in a special unit called light-year. One light-year is the distance traveled by light in one year i.e. 365 days running 24×7. Do you know how far is that ? It is approximately 9,460,730,472,581 kilometers !

And then, we do not have even a single star within one light-year distance from us (except of course Sun). The closest star from Earth is Alpha Centauri which is at a distance of 4.4 light-years. The brightest star in our sky is Sirius which is at a distance of 8.6 light-years from us while the North Star or Polaris is approximately 400 light-years away. And these are just few nearby stars. Many stars are at a much greater distance – hundreds, and thousands, and millions of light-years away from us.

What this means is, the light that we see today from a star, had started its journey from the star several years ago. May be that particular star does not even exist today, or its position in the sky has already changed. What we see is not today’s reality. It is yesterday’s reality. Today we are seeing where that star was some years ago. This “some years” may be 5 years, may be 500 years or may be 5 million years… it depends on how far away the star is. Our school books have already taught us all these.

So the star is real. We are just seeing it late. We can compare this with the “Live” broadcast of a cricket or football match. We know the broadcast is not really “Live”. There is a 5-10 minutes delay kept for editing purpose. But it does not matter much. We ignore that small delay and enjoy the match as “Live”. Same is the case for a star. The only difference is, here the delay is not just few minutes or few hours, it is in years. Still, that is kind of a reality – a reality of the past. We see the historical star, not today’s star.

That is only true as long as we are considering a particular star. The situation would dramatically change if we consider many stars together as we see in the night sky. Why ?

In ancient times, people used to believe that the stars are fixed on a celestial globe, all at an equal distance from us, and these stars do not move. The scientific techniques available during that time was insufficient to measure the true nature of stars. They did not even have a telescope. But today we know that the stars are not at a fixed distance from us. Some stars are near to us, some are far away. Moreover, nothing is standstill there. Everything is moving in this universe with respect to each other. Every star is running.

Let us consider the two stars as shown below. One star is 100 light-years away from us. It is moving from left to right along the white dotted line. The other star, on the right hand side, is 200 light-years away from us. It is moving along a path shown in yellow dotted line. The picture shows how exactly they appear in the sky today. We will find out if this picture is real or not.

Star-A : Light takes 100 years to come from this star. That means, whatever we are seeing today, is 100 years old. We are looking at the past. This is 2019. So we are seeing where the star was in the year 1919 (position A-2). Today it has moved further into position A-3. We will be able to see that position only 100 years later. What we see today is its position in 1919.

If we go back 100 years further in the history, in the year 1819, this star must have been somewhere near position A-1 as shown in the above picture. It has moved from A-1 (year 1819) to A-2 (year 1919), then A-2 to A-3 (year 2019) along that white dotted line.

Star-B : Since this star is 200 light-years away, it takes 200 years for the light to travel through this distance and reach our eyes. Hence, we are lagging behind by 200 years in this case. The current position that we see for this star, is its true position back in 1819 i.e. 200 years ago (position B-1). It was in the position B-2 in 1919. Today it has actually moved into position B-3 which we will be able to see only in future.

Now check what the position A-2 and position B-1 means together. Position A-2 is the first star’s true position in the year 1919. But position B-1 is the second star’s true position in the year 1819. These two lights are reaching together to our eyes today, in the year 2019. So we are seeing the history, but we are seeing a different history for each of them. Part of it is from the year 1819 while the other part is from the year 1919. These two different historical pictures get superimposed in the sky and we see a joint picture that has no meaning. These stars were never in these relative positions ever in their life.

Let us strengthen our understanding from a different perspective now.

Look at the above pictures carefully. The first picture shows the true positions of the stars in the year 1819 and the second picture shows the same for the year 1919. The third picture shows their current position (i.e. in 2019), which anyway we will be able to see only in the future, at two different times.

Now check the below picture.

This is how these two stars appear in the sky today. Does it match with any of their relative positions in the past history ? No. They were never in these positions relative to each other, as we see them in the sky today. A-2 is the true position of Star-A in 1919 while B-1 is that of Star-B in 1819. What do they mean together ? Simply, nothing! This means, what we see in the sky, is completely unreal. It is not true, and it was never true, never real any time in the history as well.

That’s it. In a nutshell, every star brings to us a piece of their history. But each star is at a different distance, and as a result, each star brings a different piece from their history. We see these different pieces together and our eyes make a jigsaw puzzle to develop an unreal, imaginative picture of hundreds of stars in the night sky. We just discussed about two stars above, and saw that their relative positions are unreal. Now think about those hundreds or thousands of stars – everything of which is unreal. The entire scene we perceive from the night sky, is unreal, purely imaginative.

But whatever it is, we still cherish their beauty. We get amazed looking at the endless stars making a super-natural collage in the backdrop of our dark sky, every night. Each part of it is real, but the collective picture is very much unreal, immaterial.

Immaterialism is a concept first used by George Berkeley in the 18th century. He argued that whatever we see in the real world, is imaginative… i.e. they exist only in our mind. He extended this concept to most material objects like table, chairs, trees etc. It was mostly a philosophical discussion, as it tries to disprove the very reality we are living in. Whether we accept that or not, there is no doubt that the sky we see everyday, is not real. We build the concept of reality through our vision. But our vision can be mischievous, as we just saw in this article.

Thanks for reading!

I cordially welcome your comments if you have to say anything on this write up.

~ Jeet Guha Thakurta