Is Dark Energy just Unobserved Starlight ?
We can see across 15 billion lightyears of space. The light we see originated from stars that have long-since burned out. In fact, in that timespan most stars would convert a large fraction of their mass into light.
We all know that a laser beam is invisible until it strikes an object and is scattered. The same would be true of starlight. So after 15 billion years, the visible stars and galaxies should represent only 25% or so of the total mass of the universe, with the rest converted to photons in the cores of extinct stars and transiting space, invisible to us.
Am I right?