[_jdams]

Off topic but can someone answer this for me? Are the stars in our night sky part of our galaxy or no? It seems such a stupid question to ask, but when I look online it says we have one star, our Sun, whereas other galaxies have one or multiple - for instance a galaxy with two stars would be called a Binary System.

So where are the stars in our night sky? Are they even further away than Uranus, Neptune.., but so bright we see them anyway?

EDIT: Thanks, all! Makes sense.

[letsgetphysITal]

This image gives you an idea of how these things all fit together. It's from the Wikipedia page for the "Universe"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Earth%27...

View full screen and at 100% to be able to read the text.

[Totallyboss4]

>Are the stars in our night sky part of our galaxy or no

Every star you see in the night sky with the naked eye is part of our galaxy.

>for instance a galaxy with two stars would be called a Binary System.

A galaxy usually has billions or trillion of stars. Our solar system has one star, which is our sun ( a sun is a star with planets around it). Our solar system is inside of a galaxy, which is made up of billions and billions of stars.

>So where are the stars in our night sky? Are they even further away than Uranus, Neptune.., but so bright we see them anyway?

All stars are outside of our solar system by definition. They are light-years away ( the time it takes to get there at the speed of light is years), but most planets are light-minutes away.

[1_player]

Either I didn't get your question, or you're a bit confused about the structure of the universe. Not a problem.

There's Earth, it's a planet orbiting our star, Sol AKA the Sun, in our solar system. A star has plenty of bodies orbiting around it, dust, asteroids, planets, so the whole group is called a solar system.

There's other stars "next" to us, which in turn have dust, asteroids and planets orbiting around them. So they also are solar systems, since all stars have stuff orbiting around them.

Stars (/solar systems) tend to cluster together in a galaxy. A galaxy is composed of billions of stars.

Earth/our Solar system is in the Milky Way galaxy, so most of the stuff we see in the sky are stars that are not very far from us and/or part of the Milky Way galaxy.

The closest galaxy from ours is Andromeda, which is in turn composed of billions of stars, and countless planets.

So, the order is planet (Earth) -> star (Sun) -> (grouped into a) solar system -> galaxy (Milky Way)

Binary systems are solar systems which do not have a single star, but they have TWO! and these stars orbit each other. A galaxy has millions of binary systems (not sure how rare they are)

Uranus, Neptune, etc. are part of our solar system, so yeah, the stars you see are farther beyond.

EDIT: apparently I'm a bit confused as well, as star/planet groups are called planetary systems, and only ours is called the Solar System (from Sol/the Sun). The more you know.

Does this help and answer your question?

[dsr_]

This, and also:

You can see some other galaxies with the naked eye, but not make out any of the stars within them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_galaxies#Naked-eye_gal...

Note that the Magellanic Clouds are basically orbiting our galaxy, and that the next closest independent galaxy is Andromeda, 2 and a half million light years away.

[joshvm]

As others have covered, the stars you can see are all in our galaxy. The closest star to us is around 4 light years (the sun is around 8 light minutes).

The two obvious extra-galactic objects you can see are (1) Andromeda, which appears as a small smudge but is actually huge: https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4Z_aNPDvDVU/UtvEsVBCzSI/AAAAAAAAD... and (2) the large magellanic clouds which are a bit more obvious.

Andromeda is the nearest big galaxy to us, but the LMC still has its own stars.

To answer your last question - yes, this is the concept of apparent magnitude. Stars are so incredibly bright that you can see them despite the fact they're very distant. We can see the planets even though the only light we're getting is from reflection. Look at how bright Jupiter or Saturn are, for example, and then think what a miserable fraction of the Sun's light they actually reflect, and how much of that we receive on Earth. It's a very small percentage - the Sun is just really bright.

This is an important point though - you cannot measure the size of most stars directly. We've been able to do it with very large stars, but mostly all you know is (a) That star is this bright and (b) it's this colour. From that astronomers can derive models to figure out how large it is. Even if you know the distance, it's not trivial: is it a really tiny, but stupidly bright object or is it a massive, but really dim object? Beyond a certain distance you have to use models and make educated guesses.

[dfwrider]

When we look up at the "heavens" with the naked eye, we have our own personalized "starry night", courtesy of, and unique to our own, galaxy.

We don't see the individual stars from other galaxies. We barely can even see other galaxies with the naked eye. But once technology shows us that the sky is filled with galaxies, invisible to the unassisted eye, it blows the mind away. Every galaxy has it's own unique "starry night".

Astonishingly, some have projected that there are more galaxies in the universe than stars in our Milky Way galaxy. ~d

[freax4evar]

What you are calling a 'galaxy' is actually just our solar system, one of millions in the Milky Way Galaxy. The stars you see are located in our galaxy.

[dhimes]

You can see other galaxies in the night sky. Stars in our galaxy lie primarily in the part of the sky with the most starts, the so-called 'milky way.'

Yes, they are outside of our solar system. They are ridiculously far away.

Take a peek here: https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/cosmic/farthest_info....

[piker]

> So where are the stars in our night sky? Are they even further away than Uranus, Neptune.., but so bright we see them anyway?

Yes.