Are All the Stars Seen by the Naked Eye Only in the Milky Way Galaxy?

Are all the stars seen by the naked eye only in the Milky Way galaxy?

Check out this answer from Consensus:

All the stars that can be seen with the naked eye are indeed part of the Milky Way galaxy. The impression of countless stars is primarily due to the dense band of light from the Milky Way, which is made up of many faint stars.

The question of whether all the stars visible to the naked eye belong to the Milky Way galaxy is a fascinating one. This topic delves into the nature of our galaxy and the limitations of human vision in observing celestial objects.

Key Insights

• All Naked-Eye Stars Belong to the Milky Way:
  • All stars visible to the naked eye, or even with binoculars or small telescopes, are part of our Galaxy, the Milky Way2 3.
  • The Milky Way contains about 100 billion stars, and the stars we see unaided are part of this vast stellar system3.
• Perception of Innumerable Stars:
  • The perception that the stars visible to the naked eye are countless is largely due to the Milky Way’s appearance as a dense band of light across the sky, which is actually composed of numerous faint stars1 4.

Are all the stars seen by the naked eye only in the Milky Way galaxy?

Yiannis Tsapras has answered Near Certain

An expert from Heidelberg University in Astronomy, Astrophysics, Physics, Cosmology

On a clear dark night one can see up to a few thousand stars, all of them members of our Milky Way Galaxy, with the unaided eye. It is also possible to see a few other galaxies, like the Andromeda galaxy or the large and small Magellanic clouds if you happen to be in the southern hemisphere. However, it is not possible to see individual stars in these galaxies without using a telescope.

Are all the stars seen by the naked eye only in the Milky Way galaxy?

Oliver Müller has answered Near Certain

An expert from Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg in Astronomy

Yes. Even the closest galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, is already so far away that the stars blend together for the human eye, meaning that they are seen as a diffuse extended blur instead of a point-like star. The stars visible by the naked eye are all stars in our galactic neighborhood.

Are all the stars seen by the naked eye only in the Milky Way galaxy?

Bruce G Elmegreen has answered Extremely Unlikely

An expert from IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Astronomy

We can see with our eyes some thousand stars individually, and those stars have been in catalogs for two thousand years. They are the nearest and brightest stars, close to the Sun. We see blends of stars in the haze of light that is the Milky Way, and those are in our Milky Way galaxy. In the main disk of the Milky Way, we are limited by dust absorption to only about one-quarter of the distance to the center, although infrared light, which our eyes cannot see, penetrates further. Off the main Milky Way disk we can see with our eyes the blend of stars in the thick central region of the galaxy, which is a bar-like structure and bulge. We can’t really see Milky Way stars beyond that except with infrared telescopes. So we see only a small fraction of the Milky Way stars with our eyes, maybe 10 or 20 percent, mostly blended together into a smooth light with dust patches blocking parts of it. However, we can see with our naked eyes on a dark night around half of the stars in the nearby galaxy in Andromeda (Messier 31). Andromeda also looks like a haze of light because the stars are too close together and faint to be seen individually, but that haze is about as bright as the Milky Way and so easily seen if the sky is dark enough, about the size of the full moon. Dust inside Andromeda blocks about half of its stars from our view — those on the other side of the midplane. Similarly, we can see the haze of light from the stars in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, which are the two nearest galaxies to us, visible in the southern hemisphere. We can see the haze of blended stars in a few globular clusters of stars that orbit the Milky Way, such as the Hercules cluster in the north and 47 Tucanae in the south. So in fact we can see more stars in other galaxies than we can see in the Milky Way, if we count all those stars that are blended together. But we cannot see individual stars in other galaxies except in telescopes.