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The Question
(Submitted February 02, 1998)
Are the stars we see at night all from our own galaxy? How many stars
are in our galaxy?
The Answer
We can only see a few thousand stars at most with our unaided eyes. These
are a mixture of stars which are nearby, and bright stars which are further
away; but they are only a tiny fraction of the 100,000,000,000 stars in our
own galaxy. We can't see stars in other galaxies without powerful
telescopes. In fact the entire brightest neighboring galaxy (M31, the
Andromeda galaxy), which contains more stars than our own, is only as bright
as an average star visible to the unaided eye.
Paul Butterworth
for the Ask a High-Energy Astronomer team
Questions on this topic are no longer responded to by the "Ask a
High-Energy Astronomer" service. See http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/ask_an_astronomer.html
for help on other astronomy Q&A services.
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