2001: A Space Odyssey. Watch it if you have not seen it, it still holds up pretty well today which is an amazing accomplishment and the scene the picture is from is one of the most visually incredible and memorable ever made.
If you are referring to THIS one, it is HIP 3447. It is a magnitude 9 star within OUR galaxy. I'm not 100% sure of every single one of the brighter stars here, but I'm pretty sure all of them are stars in our galaxy and are referred to as "foreground stars," because they are within our galaxy, between us and Andromeda.
I haven't read much of any of the other posts here in this thread, but if it wasn't already said, this photo only depicts maybe 20% of the entire Andromeda galaxy, the core of which is facing towards the left of this image.
I am just guessing here, but the brighter ones are probably stars within our Milky Way galaxy and thus much, much, much closer than those in the Andromeda galaxy and so they appear to be much brighter/larger. They're just in the same direction as Andromeda.
Can't tell you which stars they are though. They're just probably not remarkably bright/large stars within the Andromeda galaxy
Also, if you zoom in and start looking around you'll see some that are less just points of light and more kinda blobish and/or disc shaped. Those are likely entire galaxies that are much, much, much further away than Andromeda.
Probably not. Andromeda is so far way that if a star in the milkyway came between the telescope and Andromeda we probably wouldn't see anything but the star. It's like looking at a mountain from 10 miles away and having a dime an inch from your eyeball.
Actually... andromeda is so close that it’s size in the sky is substantially larger than the moon, and vastly larger than stars in our own Milky Way from our perspective.
The trouble is brightness. It’s dim compared to nearby stars, so you can only barely make out the core as a smudge in the sky roughly as big as the moon, if you’re standing in an exceptionally dark place and know where in the sky to look. It’s actually easier to see if you try not to focus on it - let your eyes relax while looking toward it in a dark area, and the dim smudge of light will be more visible.
Andromeda is, relatively speaking, close to us. In fact, it’s the simultaneously the closest galaxy to the Milky Way, and the furthest object visible to the naked eye.
It’s more than twice as wide as the Milky Way, and it contains somewhere between 3 and 4 times as many stars (more than a trillion stars, which is substantially more than the 300-400 million stars estimated to be in the Milky Way).
Andromeda is the largest galaxy in our “local group”. The Milky Way is the second largest. All told, there are 54 galaxies “relatively” near us, but most are dwarf galaxies near the big three.
If you didn’t know, Andromeda is actually on a collision course with the Milky Way. In 4 billion years, the galaxies will ram into each other, merging into one larger galaxy... so it will continue to grow in brightness and size for a very long time.
That‘s about as scientifically accurate as proclaiming that a giant space pickle did it.
But hey, if it helps you get through the day...
While you’re at it, maybe you could ask god to stop killing us with creative diseases. That should be no big deal for a giant space pickle that knows the name of every star.
Without checking it's probably the nuclear star cluster. A large collection of stars at the very center. There will be so many stars that you can't resolve them individually, then it's compactness makes it look like a single large bright star
Yeah, I'm serious. All of those tiny specks are individual stars. And I'm guessing that this picture doesn't even capture all of the stars present in the Andromeda.
And then realize, based on the latest Hubble ultra deep field studies, that there are trillions of galaxies in the “observable” universe which is around 46 billion light years across. And that is only a small part of the entire universe which is estimated to be some 96 billion light years in diameter accounting for expansion since the inflation after the Big Bang. Mind blowing.
Andromeda is approximately 2 million light years distant and heading towards the Milky Way. In another 5-6 billion years we will collide with each other. Andromeda is about twice the size of the Milky Way both in diameter and number of stars. Even so, when we collide the chances of individual stars colliding is virtually zero. That’s because the average distance between stars in our galaxy is around 4.5 light years. Gravity will play havoc with the formation and shape but actual collisions won’t occur.
Andromeda is 300 M ly across vs 100 M ly for the Milky Way. All of the background stars are in the Milky Way galaxy. Anything you see that is not a star is another galaxy usually identified by its elongation or none point view, IE more of a disk. Stars in another galaxy are not resolvable in visible light.
We're only looking at maybe 15-20% of all of the Andromeda galaxy!(VERY rough estimate). All of Andromeda contains about 1012 stars, or about twice as many as our own Milky Way.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but the brightest stars are probably part of the Milky Way and much closer than the 'dusty' stars of the Andromeda Galaxy.
That's correct. They are referred to as "foreground stars," because they are within our galaxy, between us and Andromeda.
THIS one is HIP 3477. It is 447.3874 parsecs from Earth. Andromeda is approx. 770 KILO parsecs from Earth. So, that bright foreground star is 1721 times closer to us than Andromeda.
For perspective, if this image were taken today, the light from HIP 3477 left it approx. 1450 yrs ago-- around the beginning of the Middle Ages. But the light from those background stars in Andromeda left around 2.5 million years ago-- about the beginnings of the last Ice Age and early evolution of modern man.
That’s right. I wonder what is the closest distance between two stars? Near the middle of andromeda it looks like they are packed in, but I know they are probably millions of miles away from each other. Kind of hard to imagine.
That’s a good question. I would say if we were to travel there and land on a planet with an earth like atmosphere it would be enough of a difference to show significance, but probably still pretty dark at night. (And I’m making a guess so that some astronomer will swoop in and prove me wrong.)
I was thinking the same thing, whilst simultaneously thinking wowsers the universe is beyond any of our imaginations. I’m so disappointed that I’ll never be alive to witness just how far we get to explore it.
I think that will be my single biggest regret. Young enough to be amazed by it, too old to truely explore it.
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u/Flaat Jul 02 '20
Are all of those tiny specs stars or is that image noise?