Are Any Stars Visible In
The Night Sky Already Dead?

The only star I'm concerned about dying is the sun and it's going to outlive us by billions of years.

One of the nice things about a Universe with a finite speed of light is that it preserves the principle of locality. This just means that every observer in the Universe has an equal claim to say that "What you can detect is all that is real". It makes no sense to speculate on information that is outside our light cone of experience because it can never affect our reality. People have speculated that a giant supernova could have exploded outside our light cone and the deadly gamma radiation that will destroy all life on our planet is bearing down on us at this very instant. Locality just means we don't need to worry about stuff like this.

It's getting more difficult to see a night sky full of stars because of light from cities. I remember when I worked on oil tankers, and seeing the night sky from a thousand miles out in the ocean. I was just floored by many that were visible. The sky was blanketed with stars. Even the tilt of the milky way galaxy was visible. Growing up outside of Philly one could see not even a tenth of the number of stars even on a clear night.

Yes, a few of them. So what? Their death will be announced by a colossal explosion. But in general stars last a VERY long time.

By the time light from our Sun reaches a planet 5 Billion light-years away, the Sun will be dead. Being that the Universe is much older than our Sun, by at least 10 Billion years, there are probably Trillions of stars that no longer exist. We can still enjoy looking at the light from them, even if it took millions of years to get here! A better question is: Is journalism dead?

IIRC, the currently accepted age of the Universe is ~13.8 billion years. The oldest stars we can see are estimated to be ~13 billion. I suspect that some of those are gone now, even though we still receive their light.

If they are dead you can't see them...if they died and are very far away they died long before we were here thinking we're the only thing in the universe...and the earth is flat and everything in the ski is a light/candle, not a star or a planet...

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), when launched (hopefully!) next year, will be able to peer further back than any other telescope in history. It will replace Hubble as the premiere viewing platform and will orbit the Sun from the L2 LaGrange point beyond Earth-it will forever be in the shadow of the Earth. It'll have a huge mirror compared to Hubble and specializes in infrared light so it can see stars forming in dust clouds impenetrable by visible light. And it will be able to see almost to the beginning of time-all the way to the first stars born after the Big Bang, whose light is so far away it has red-shifted due to distance and the expansion of space. And there probably are stars that have died out that we still see because the light from the supernova hasn't reached us yet-Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion is a prime candidate.

Sailing offshore at night, one can see so many stars it's almost overwhelming. If you're a star gazer, even a wonderer I recommend the Sky Guide app for the iPhone - not sure of others. Go outside and just point at your desired point of light and overlays appear of the constellations, names of stars and planets, etc. Super for kids - I are one at heart - and a fun thing to do with them is star name guessing.

Seeing that there are more stars in the Universe than grains of sand on Earth I'd say the question is from a quantity standpoint insignificant. Interesting that that many suns could come from "nothing" according to astronomers / scientists. Their answer is an infinite number of "inflationary" events (only existing as a need to explain our postulated big bang created universe rather than an observed and understood physical phenomenon) as well as their belief that every microscopic event that requires a choice chooses all possible choices (another infinity - see quantum mechanics & particle / wave duality and the previous explanation in parenthesis). Infinity x infinity = anything by definition is not just possible but necessary OR one creative event that fine tuned this reality for life. Orcan's razor says Door #2 is the logical choice. PS - the number grains of sand on Earth is infinitely less than what astronomers and scientist currently postulate is as the number of universes and dimensions that would have to exist to explain our current Universe without a creator. Their fallback strategy is our Universe is a computer program of another / future intelligence. Reminds me of turtles all the way down!

Unless it was all CREATED at one time per the Bible and He “stretched out the heavens”! I can believe in a Creator...I can’t get on board with Everything Out Of Nothing...

The author's question is about stars visible to the naked eye. So his point about lower-mass, longer-lived stars far outnumbering their higher-mass cousins is irrelevant, since those lower-mass stars aren't in the naked-eye-visible subset that he is asking about. The stars visible to the naked eye are generally much brighter and hotter than our own, and they burn through their nuclear fuel at a remarkably fast rate. Our observation of them is generally NOT at the start of their lives, either; so it's quite possible that some of them may have already burned out. Given a spectral analysis and approximate distance, a pretty fair estimate can be made of how much longer a star has before it burns through the stages of its life. I bet there is the relevant data in published research for the 9000 naked-eye-visible stars. I kind of wish I was in a position to squander a couple of weeks to find and collect it. (But that's what this article should have done, instead of just asking the question and showing a few neat images.)

The farthest light visible to the most powerful telescopes was generated approx 13 billion years ago? - not long after the Big Bang. At some point the telescopes will run out of farther light because at the Big Bang the universe was a point and there were no stars, so if you look out past the Big Bang there is nothing. . Where those farthest distant quasars are now is anyone's guess, but they're 13 billion light years away from where they appear - and it's possible they may have rebounded and are heading back from where they came.

Another thing of interest to me is that the light we see from some stars was generated before the earth existed. So the earth was created and has essentially "run into" the path of light that was created before earth was created. Like walking into the path of a bullet that was fired before you were born.