The sky is filled with rivers of darkness

Your eyes lie to you. 

When you go outside on a crisp, clear night and look at the stars, it looks like they rule the sky, the only denizens of the black.

Oh, certainly, if you happen to see the Milky Way stretched out above you as well it looks fuzzy, like a stream of milk that gives our galaxy its name (and even gives us the very word galaxy). But that’s an illusion of sorts, the combined light of billions of individual stars too dim to see on their own. Even that just affirms the stellar pr...