This question arose from a different question I was about to post, namely, do stars inside the Pillars of Creation have a perpetually cloudy sky with no stars in the sky?
Feel free to answer that, but here’s something more interesting to me: how many conclusions could people living inside the pillars reach about the universe? Seems like 90% of the knowledge we’ve amassed about the big bang and the laws of physics is dependent on being able to look into the sky and observe other galaxies and stars at some point.
So, stated simply: what might people living without stars know about the universe as a whole?
I wouldn’t say 90% of what we know about physics comes from astronomy. Certainly celestial mechanics is a handy test bed for theories of frictionless, inertial motion and gravitational attraction. And Newton’s reformulation of Kepler’s laws of motion as a necessary consequence of a simple inverse-square law was one of the great triumphs of observational science, providing a clear foundation for the modern scientific method, if not directly informing the content of most modern science.
But you asked about stars, not planets. Without visible stars, cosmology would have been stunted at an early stage. Beings on a planet in the midst of the pillars of creation could not even deduce that the universe is finite following an argument like that (made in 1823) from Olber’s paradox , much less determine that the universe is expanding by measuring redshifts.
Eventually, though, the beings in the cloudy pillars might discover other wavelengths of light and open other windows to the cosmos. (Assuming they didn’t have x-ray eyes to start with.) The pillars are (or were) mostly cold hydrogen gas, transparent to radio waves and x-rays. At that point, they would face challenges not unlike those posed by our atmosphere at certain wavelengths, at least in kind. In degree, they’d have a much greater challenge.
It is worth pointing out that the current puzzles of dark matter and dark energy make our sympathy with these hypothetical beings particularly keen.
I’m also reminded of the Asimov short story “Nightfall”, set on a world with six suns. The effect of this is that the stars almost never come out, and because of the complicated gravitational dance of the stars, gravity takes an awfully long time to be explained.
