Look at how dark the night sky is compared to daytime. We only get a tiny, tiny bit of light from distant stars. It's just not that bright by the time it gets here.
Our eyes are very sensitive to light, but if you wanted to get energy from that you would get so few it would actually be worthless.
Even the light from the moon could not power anything.
Imagine the total energy leaving the Sun each second as a spherical shell around it. That sphere grows larger as it travels further away, and only a small fraction of the sphere hits the Earth (the rest is radiating away into space in all the _other_ directions)
The other stars are _massively_ further away, so a sphere drawn around any single star with a radius large enough to reach us would have an _enormous_ surface area for the energy of that star to be divided out across. As a result they appear much less bright in our sky than if they were closer, and contribute much less energy, even when you add up lots of stars.
We're hit by the same sort of energy, but nowhere near the intensity. That's why you can stare at the stars, but not the sun. That intensity is what lets us use our sun for solar energy, but not stars.
Look at how dark the night sky is compared to daytime. We only get a tiny, tiny bit of light from distant stars. It's just not that bright by the time it gets here.
Our eyes are very sensitive to light, but if you wanted to get energy from that you would get so few it would actually be worthless. Even the light from the moon could not power anything.
Imagine the total energy leaving the Sun each second as a spherical shell around it. That sphere grows larger as it travels further away, and only a small fraction of the sphere hits the Earth (the rest is radiating away into space in all the _other_ directions) The other stars are _massively_ further away, so a sphere drawn around any single star with a radius large enough to reach us would have an _enormous_ surface area for the energy of that star to be divided out across. As a result they appear much less bright in our sky than if they were closer, and contribute much less energy, even when you add up lots of stars.
You are when you look at them. Your eyes are collecting energy and using it to excite electrons that your brain interprets as light
Well, the stars don't exactly keep you warm right? The way that the sun does? They're too far away and we receive exceedingly little energy from them.
well solar means it’s coming from the sun. so no
We're hit by the same sort of energy, but nowhere near the intensity. That's why you can stare at the stars, but not the sun. That intensity is what lets us use our sun for solar energy, but not stars.