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A cosmology question. Every single star we see at night unaided is within our own Milky Way galaxy. There is only one galaxy (I was told only if you don't count the Magellanic Clouds or the Triangulum galaxy... but the point mostly stands) capable of being seen with the naked eye, Andromeda, our closest neighboring major galaxy, which is around 2.5 million light years away (that's a whole lot of empty space). If we were in a spacecraft halfway between the Milky Way and Andromeda, what would our view be like? Would it look about the same as our own night sky, except instead of being full of stars we would be seeing galaxies all around that merely looked liked stars as their distance was so great? Would the density of these celestial bodies be about the same as we view in our own region of space, say from a vantage point somewhere in our solar system, or would it be remarkably different, whether a higher or lower density?

[Edited for correct distance to Andromeda]

WilliamCharles 8 Apr 10
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We are currently in a dust cloud that wildly obscures our night sky. Halfway between the two galaxies the night sky would be almost unimaginably awesome, with a huge part of the sky being one or the other galaxies (or both) spanning a huge portion of the sky, and countless intergalactic stars and distant galaxies visible. The night sky would be almost solid with things we could see.

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OK, a little off as to the size of the two galaxies in the night sky, they would each be about twice the size of this, that's what Andromeda would look like if Earth wasn't stuck in a dusty arm of the Milky Way. There would still be countless other nearby galaxies and intergalactic stars visible in the pristine clarity of intergalactic space.

@Mortal Take it up with Phil Plait. [slate.com]

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Turns out after repairing the Hubble space telescope, astronomers were getting readings with some stars being older than the age of the universe (14+ billion years old vs 13+ billion years old).

For those preferring to read about the discrepancy.

[forbes.com]

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My bias is form nothing to nothing
What is a star
How is created
What it consists
Gas light energy form nothing to nothing
My observation

Rosh Level 7 Apr 10, 2018

Cosmologists on the origin of the universe,

"Something came from nothing because 'nothing' was unstable."

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[planetary.org]

Carl Sagan's pale blue dot quote is about as moving an observation as to our place in the cosmos as was ever spoken.

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More perspective. Earth from the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. We are a spacefaring people

About half the human species is in that photo.

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Interesting question! But firstly, there are two other galaxies that we can see with the naked eye - the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which are best seen from South of the Equator; they are smaller satellite galaxies of our Milky Way, about 70,000 LY away. And if you have good eyesight, and a very clear dark sky, and know where to look, you can also see M33, the Triangulum Galaxy, which is just slightly further away than the Andromeda Galaxy, at about 2.7 million LY. It's actually fairly close to the Andromeda Galaxy in our sky.
But back to your question: if you were halfway between the MW and the Andromeda Galaxy, you wouldn't see any individual stars at all, but you would see the Andromeda Galaxy twice as big and twice as bright as we see it now, and you would see the Milky Way as something similar, but just a bit smaller and fainter than Andromeda would look, since Andromeda is a bit bigger and brighter than the MW.
It's just possible that there might be a few stray 'interloper' stars between us and the Andromeda Galaxy, although it's unlikely that any would be close enough to you to be visible.

A link I provided below clarifies that somewhat so I need to edit my original post to qualify it suitably. One link says the "closest major galaxy" and another says the "closest major spiral galaxy." In one it shows the status of the Magellanic nebulae wasn't established till around 2003. I wasn't aware of the Triangulum galaxy also being visible to the naked eye. That's exactly why I like throwing this stuff out there, and deferring to those more knowledgeable.

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