Tag: Field Stars

More Stuff to Block Galaxies

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A few days ago I wrote about a galaxy that was tough to see because of Milky Way field stars.  But our galaxy is far more than just a bunch of stars smattered about.  There is also a huge amount of gas and dust with varying temperatures.  Some of the hotter and more illuminated gas and dust are what make nebulae so lovely in space.  But the cold gas and dark dust that is just out floating in the cold interstellar medium? That stuff gets in the way. A normal image of interacting galaxies M81 and M82 would try to hide the...

Galactic Hide and Seek

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Remember the big picture of Andromeda that showed 100 Million stars? That image resulted in a ton of new galaxy discoveries.  Most of these new galaxies were once hidden beyond the Andromeda galaxy, but with the super high resolution image, astronomers and the public were able to look straight through and see far more distant objects. Most images of galaxies have what we call ‘field stars’ in them.  These are some of the 400 Billion stars of the Milky Way that are far closer than the galaxy we are imaging.  For this reason, galaxy images tend to look very cluttered...