Are the stars that we see in the sky really there?

Most of them yes, however some of them have exploded or have burned through their fuel and no longer shine, though we still see them because the light is coming from so far away.

When you see a star at night, if that star is 1000 light years away, you are seeing it as it was 1000 years ago. When you see the the Moon, you are seeing as it was about 3 seconds ago. If the sun were to go out, it would take about 8 minutes for us to realize it since the light takes that long to reach us.

One light year is the distance light travels in one year, or about 6.3 trillion miles. The closest start to Earth other than our sun is about 25 trillion miles away. If that star disappeared today, we would not know for 4.3 years.

The light we see left the stars in the past, that's true.

The light we see now from a star 10 light years away left that star 10 years ago.

But consider that they only thing we have to go on is what we can observe. So from our perspective the stars really are there - if a star 10 light years away suddenly disappeared right at this moment, we wouldn't see it disappear from our perspective for 10 years.

But in the meantime, as far as we could possibly know the star still exists.

All stars are several light-years away. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year. So technically it took the light from any star that you see several years to reach the earth.

The stars that you see with the naked eye are still there. Stars go through several changes before they actually die out. Stars last for billions of years and go through certain changes. They do not just die abruptly.

While this is theoretically true, for all intents and purposes it is a myth. The farthest stars we can see with our naked eyes are a few thousand light years away, and so the light we see from them has been travelling for a few thousand years. However. a few thousand years is a tiny instant when the lifetimes of stars are measured in tens of thousands to billions of years.

Yes they are there and we are not alone.........