Your steel bar example isn't analogous. You had an intuition, discovered a physical constraint (speed of sound), and the math checked out. The constraint explained the phenomenon. What would it look like if the "established" model of the world were actually wrong?
Here, the math doesn't check out. That's my point.
I'm not saying "it seems like stars should be invisible but they're not", Im showing that inverse square law - which we can verify at human scales - predicts invisibility at stellar distances, and the proposed compensation (25x more luminosity) is insufficient by orders of magnitude.
Sirius is "billions of times dimmer" than the sun to our eyes IF you mean the Sun as seen from Earth versus Sirius as seen from Earth. But that's not the comparison. The comparison is:
Sun moved to 544,000 AU (Sirius's distance): 296 billion times dimmer than Sun at 1 AU
Sirius at 544,000 AU: 25x brighter than that
25x doesn't bridge a 296-billion-fold gap, plus the eye's dynamic range is irrelevant; we're comparing what brightness should reach the eye versus what compensation the model claims.
If your claim is "the eye can see across many orders of magnitude, so even though the Sun would be invisible at stellar distances, Sirius being slightly brighter makes it visible," then do the actual calculation. Show that 25x more luminosity produces enough photons to cross the detection threshold. Because the math I'm showing says it doesn't.
You're assuming the model works and looking for why my intuition is wrong. I'm showing the model's numbers are internally inconsistent. Those aren't the same thing.
>I've found that when I have a thought that seems to contradict the "established" model of the world, I tend to just be missing some critical factor.
Does it bother you that to make relativity work, they had to invent dark matter and dark energy - 96% of the universe's mass-energy - as fudge factors? At what point does "missing a critical factor" become "the model requires constant patching to match observations"?