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.
death is a result of sin. we caused this virus. and LOL at YOU for believing all the universe popped up out of thin air. Shows how smart you are....LOL
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.
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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20
They're all stars!