A: Space, or the background of the night sky looks black because the amount of energy in the form of visible light coming from most directions, is too low for the human eye to detect. This is despite the fact that there are faint objects emitting light from all directions in the cosmos. The stars at night that are visible to the naked eye are either the planets in our solar system, or stars in the general galactic neighbourhood of our own star, the Sun. The "Milky Way" is the glow coming from more distant stars in the direction of the plane of our own spiral galaxy. If your eyes are very good, you may be see our neighbouring galactic formations, the Magellan Clouds and the very faint Andromeda Galaxy. Even though objects are approximately uniformly distributed throughout the observable universe, the intensity of light that reaches any point from an object decreases according to the square of the distance between the object and the point, hence nearly all objects beyond our own galaxy are to faint to be observed.
