The title mostly says it all,are there any stars between the galaxies or if there are would they be undetectable with todays astronomical equipment?
That artist conception is B A D.
If the star your planet is orbiting is rising or setting over the horizon, I seriously doubt that you are going to be seeing nearby galaxies.
Plus the picture is just plain ugly to boot.
They’re probably there, largely castoffs from galactic collisions but they’e be enormously difficult to detect even withoin our local group of galaxies, and likely impossible outside of it.
Err, did you miss my link?
Not really.
Back in the WW2 era astronomers were able to detect individual stars in nearby galaxies, called Cephied variables. Because these particular variable stars had a fixed period for a fixed brightness (roughly speaking), they were able to determine the distance to nearby galaxies as well as get a handle on that redshift = distance thing as well.
Given that todays telescopes are MUCH bigger than scopes of yesteryear and that todays electronic cameras are litterally a hundred times more sensitive than WW2 film, detecting intergalactic stars in our galactic neighborhood isnt that difficult.
Now, there are also 2 aspects to “detecting”. Lets place a star wayyy out there. If we know exactly where to look, can we detect it? Yes.
On the flip side. You see a gazillion faint stars in the sky with your scope. Tell me which ones are in intergalatic space…much harder…
Its more like the needle in the haystack problem. Its not that you can’t find the needle so much as there is alot of stuff you have to sift through that isnt the needle.
Um, I don’t click nondescriptive links at work, thanks.
Because hubblesite.org is likely to be porn?
Well I suppose you can never be sure, but why are you being pissy about it?
Because you were wrong?
Honestly, you can never be too sure nowadays. When my wife worked at a middle school, a teacher had a rather embarrassing accident when looking up the White House web site in a computer class. The teacher typed whitehouse.com rather than whitehouse.gov.
Glad to see that I’m not the only one.
Well there’s a major difference between a .com site and a .gov or .org, as the computer teacher should have known.
Besides, another poster had already responded to my link.
It is entirely your prerogative not to click on a link. But to ignore that one has been given? And then to be dismissive when it is gently pointed out? That’s rude.
If Q.E.D. wanted me to expand on what was in the link, he should have just asked.
The URL wasn’t in the text, the link was just “Yes.” Someone not knowing if it’s safe for work and not clicking on it is nothing to get offended about.
When you hover over it the link is shown at the bottom of the browser.
Yes, but it’s easy enough to look at the URL without clicking the link. ETA as RaftPeople points out.
Agreed, and I’m not. As I pointed out in my last post.
First of all, Cepheids are extremely bright, as stars go, so the fact that Cepheids can be detected at intergalactic distances doesn’t tell you anything about the detectability of more typical stars. Second, while Cepheids are an essential rung on the distance ladder, they’re not visible at any range where cosmological redshift is relevant: Their only role in determining the redshift-distance relationship is in calibrating other methods that can work at those distances.
Extremely bright stars and small telescopes and film vs normal stars and big telescopes and state of the art CCDS.
Off the the top of my head I think they roughly compensate. Run some numbers and tell me if I am wrong though. I havent actually run them myself recently enough to remember the results. But I do remember back in the 80’s someone saying a run of the mill CCD camera and a 10 to 20 inch scope was equal to what you could do with a 200 inch telescope and film.
You are right about the Cepheids being more calibratory than anything else, but it is still an important role…and the main point still stands. Nearly three generations ago we could detect individual stars in other galaxies.
Would galaxies be visible like stars in the night sky of an intergalactic planet? Is the reason we don’t see galaxies like that with the naked eye due to light pollution of our own stars, or would they be too distant and faint anyway? Too bad if so, I’m so sick of all our boring stars. They all look the same. It would be nice to see all those things Hubble photographs.
yes and no
The biggest and mostly closest galaxy to us is the Andromeda Galaxy. On a clear night in really dark sky you can see it. But its just this faint ellipse shaped cloud with a brighter center thats a handfull of degrees long. Nothing to write home about. Just a bunch of stuff like that in the sky would be even more boring than lots of stars IMO.
Now, the nearest normal sized galaxy to us is us!
The milky way is downright spectacular in a dark clear sky, but its so close(we live near the outer edge) its kind of hard to see the forest for the trees so to speak. If we were just a bit farther from it might be more spectacular in some respects and more recognizable as a galaxy rather than a bunch of stars in the sky.
I do know one thing though. You aint seeing ANY nearby galaxies when your local sun is above the horizon !
Considering how much energy that would mean that the galaxy in question is putting out, you’d better HOPE you don’t.
My God! It’s full of faint ellipse-shaped clouds with brighter centers!