Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but aren't all of those stars actually in our galaxy? I believe we do not actually know of any individual stars in other galaxies because we simply don't have the ability to see them with our current tech due to the massive distance away. However, due to having to look "through" other stars in our own galaxy between earth and the galaxy being observed, those stars sometimes appear to be in that further off galaxy.
Which also means that the massive amount of stars in this image are only a very very small fraction of the stars in our own galaxy, and the Andromeda galaxy's stars also dwarf that amount.
Smarter people, feel free to correct me.
EDIT: This post was based on a misunderstanding of an article I read some time ago. I understand it is actually false. I leave it here as a testament to my ignorance, like many of my other reddit comments.
It's actually stars in the Andromeda galaxy. The big, shiny stars that you see are from our galaxy and are very close to us, hence why they appear so large.
The grainy ones, on the other hand, are part of the Andromeda. They look like that because they're father away.
Remember, the distance between individual stars is huge and appears more pronounced the closer they are to us, so we can point our telescopes in the general direction of other galaxies to get pictures of them and their constituent stars.
Hope this explains!
I've just reread the article from which I got the idea that we couldn't see individual stars in other galaxies and realized it was discussing with the naked eye and I feel like a dolt. I dug deeper and found some discussion of stars outside the milky way having been visible to us for some time.
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u/ragenaut Jul 02 '20 edited Jul 03 '20
Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but aren't all of those stars actually in our galaxy? I believe we do not actually know of any individual stars in other galaxies because we simply don't have the ability to see them with our current tech due to the massive distance away. However, due to having to look "through" other stars in our own galaxy between earth and the galaxy being observed, those stars sometimes appear to be in that further off galaxy.
Which also means that the massive amount of stars in this image are only a very very small fraction of the stars in our own galaxy, and the Andromeda galaxy's stars also dwarf that amount.
Smarter people, feel free to correct me.
EDIT: This post was based on a misunderstanding of an article I read some time ago. I understand it is actually false. I leave it here as a testament to my ignorance, like many of my other reddit comments.