Do we see other stars in the night sky or other galaxies?
A science teacher once told me the stars we see aren’t actually stars but other galaxies but since they’re so far away they look like little clusters of light aka a star??
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answers:
nineteenthly say: Most of what you can see with the naked eye are stars, but you can see three or four galaxies. Two of them are very close and look like parts of the Milky Way. The others are dim and diffuse but a couple of millions of light years away. None of them look like stars though.
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Jeffrey K say: Every star you see in the sky is a star (or planet). Other galaxies are way to dim to see without a telescope. The Andromeda Galaxy can barely be seen on a clear dark night.
In a telescope, galaxies look like fuzzy blobs or swirls. Far away galaxies might look like points of light in a telescope.
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Clive say: Hello, it's you and "your science teacher" again. I'm not falling for it.
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quantumclaustrophobe say: We *can* see other galaxies, but they don't look like stars.... they're very faint, cloudy areas in the sky. The stars we do see when we look up are truly stars, and they're all within a few dozen to a few hundred light years - with some being a bit further away.
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poldi2 say: No, the stars we see in the sky are stars in our galaxy. We can see galaxies in the sky but they are not pinpoints of light.
He may have been referring to quasars, that look like stars but are actually the active nuclei of distant galaxies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar
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tham153 say: Only four galaxies are visible to the unaided eye. In the Northern hemisphere M31 and M33. In the Southern, the Magellanic Clouds
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Bill-M say: 99 percent of what you see in the night sky are stars. With the naked eye you can only see one galaxy = Andromeda. You can also see some planets. Venus and Jupiter are the easy ones to see as they are very bright.
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Argent say: We see both stars and galaxies. There are thousands of stars that are close enough to see with the unaided eye (about 5000 of them). The only galaxies that we can see unaided, though, are the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Magellanic Clouds. They are large enough and close enough that they do not appear point-like (as stars do), but as hazy patches of light.
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solo say: Some are individual stars, Some are entire galaxies.
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Henry say: They are lights on or near the firmament put there by God through Jesus. The earth is flat. Space is fake.
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CarolOklaNola say: Most stars are in our own Milky Way Galaxy, assuming you live in the northern hemisphere and the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are never above your horizon. That may be a false assumption on my part. The Andromeda I (M 31) Galaxy is a naked eye slightly fuzzy star in 7 x 35 mm binoculars in Virgo. Some other galaxies may be naked eye "stars," but .most stars that are not planets or the Sun really are stars.
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PhotonX say: With the naked eye the only way you're likely to see galaxies is if you live in the Southern Hemisphere and can see the Magellanic Clouds. On a good dark night with good eyes you *might* just be able to see the Andromeda Galaxy.
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With telescopes the sky is the limit. You must have seen the Hubble Deep Field and Ultra Deep Field images, right? Thousands of galaxies seen in an area easily smaller than a sugar cube held at arms' length--some of the most significant pictures ever made. There are at most perhaps 500 billion stars that we can directly see, those of our own Milky Way Galaxy. We currently estimate the number of visible galaxies at one trillion, roughly twice as many galaxies as stars, but given that I could be off by one half such that there are twice as many stars in the Galaxy, I think it's fair to say that there are equal numbers of each. But not with the naked eye.was
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