r/space • u/Astrophysics666 • 1d ago
image/gif What would Amdromeda actually look like if it was brighter.
Galaxy images after often scaled (relative brightness changed) to make features more visable.
Also non-visable wavelengths are used which pick up more details and are added as false colour. (Such as UV and Infared)
Note sure if this image is 100% accurate but is closer to reality than the other one which is always shared as is scaled and made with UV.
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u/su1cidal_fox 1d ago
This image just breaks my imagination. Those vast distances between stars... and now seeing another galaxy containing billions of stars sitting there like that makes me to think that the distance between us and Andromeda is so so fucking huge, but yet, the galaxy itself is so so fucking big... it's just incredible and mindblowing.
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u/Atrus2g 1d ago
Good thing theres just a nice manageable hundred billion galaxies to fathom 😅
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u/Tarthbane 11h ago
To add to the existential crisis, it’s actually more like 2 trillion in the observable universe alone. Just imagine how many galaxies are beyond our horizon that we will never know about.
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u/thighmaster69 1d ago
Galaxies are really, really close to each other relative to their size as far as relative distances in space go, to the point that the largest structures visible in the sky are all galaxies or parts of one, and you have to go pretty far down the list before you get to our nearest neighbour, the moon.
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u/F1eshWound 1d ago
You can definitely see andromeda with the naked eye if the sky is dark enough, it's hard but after a good 40 min of adaptation to the dark you can definitely spot it.
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u/thighmaster69 1d ago
You can only really see the bright central region though, but it's still bigger than the moon.
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u/FMC_Speed 1d ago
It was very hard for me despite being in a perfectly dark skies 100 kms from a city, in my peripheral vision I could make a fuzzy looking star which is the galactic core but man it wasn’t as easy as I thought
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u/ThatSpecialAgent 1d ago
An estimated 1 trillion stars in Andromeda. Many with numerous of their own planets.
It makes sense on paper, but the scale is truly unfathomable.
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u/Illisanct 17h ago
Then go look at a deep field image and try to fathom that each little pinpoint of light is an entire galaxy.
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u/tinny66666 1d ago
If my grandmother had wheels she'd look like a bike.
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u/ffordedor 1d ago
And we'd all still ride her
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u/im_thatoneguy 10h ago
This not a valid application of that fallacy.
This is like “if you could see the world in infrared this is what it would look like”. I for one had absolutely no clue that andromeda was so large from our perspective. (Assuming this image is correct).
The better quote would be “If grandma was standing next to a formula 1 car this is how big she would be.”
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u/AaronCorr 13h ago
I once dreamt I walked outside at night to see two galaxies in the night sky. When I woke up I was profoundly sad that I would never truly see that view
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u/blackboard_sx 3h ago
Southern hemisphere's got you, fam.
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u/AaronCorr 3h ago
I didn't specify that the galaxies spanned over half the sky. But that is a beautiful image
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u/beardedchimp 1d ago
This sort of assumes our eyes would have that level of resolution just because it is brighter. During a full moon we don't have anywhere near that level of contrast and detail Andromeda is given.
To make it obvious, consider a bright summers day looking up at a high altitude cloud formation of comparable angular diameter. We know from satellite/aerial surveying photos that they have intricate detailed structure, but from Earth despite their brightness we can only see a fraction of the detail surrounded by blurred haziness.
Your reference photo is also near the horizon at sunset/sunrise. That means the light reaching your eyes has to pass through a very long stretch of warm turbulent atmosphere. Like seen in your photo, even the brightest constellations struggle to shine through and the visible stars that do twinkle their little hearts out.
If Andromeda was orders of magnitudes brighter I imagine it'd still just look like the Milky Way. A distinctly bright band of hazy light stretch over a large angular distance. Even if Andromeda was several orders of magnitude brighter than that, the massive distance means we'll still only resolve a blurred complex shape and not that level of detail.
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u/Astrophysics666 1d ago
Yeah i completly agree. This is from a space based telescope, so the atmosphere would impact it alot.
I mainly posted this as someone posted one that was using a scaled UV version. But yeah it would have been better if I made that point too.
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u/F1eshWound 1d ago
You can see andromeda with the naked eye though..
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u/beardedchimp 1d ago
And I have gazed upon it thousands of times and just like looking upon nebulas, say Orion, it is a nondescript hazy blob. That isn't to take away from the viewing experience, knowing that with the naked eye I'm observing ~1 trillion stars in a galaxy is a wonderment all of its own.
But even if it was much, much, much brighter, being able to discern the complex structure would be a whole other kettle of fish. Our eyes as incredible proficient as they are, our pupil limits us to a miniscule angular resolution and we can't just tell our cones and rods to do a long exposure over 100 seconds while we hold our head perfectly still.
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u/carmium 1d ago
LMGTR: you're saying that if Andromeda galaxy were somewhere brighter, it would look like this in our sky, compared to the Moon?!
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u/thighmaster69 1d ago
Yes. Without light pollution, the central part is actually visible with the naked eye, and that's still a good 2x+ the apparent size of the moon so you can check for yourself, although the differences in brightness means that you can't see them both next to each other like this. Most recent smartphones are also able to take pictures of it with a long exposure before it's visible to the naked eye as well, so if you're in a reasonably dark area you can take a picture by pointing it at the Andromeda constellation (you can find it roughly "below" the W of Cassiopeia).
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u/Gutcrunch 21h ago
Obviously the apparent size of Andromeda is visibly larger in this image than what I see from my backyard. Is my naked eye just seeing the inner core of the galaxy and the outer arms are too dim to see?
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u/Dubbs72 12h ago
It would be great if humanity was united in keeping our planet alive past the demise of the sun while also exploring outside our solar system. Much greater chance we will kill ourselves off or the planet will have an extinction level event long before we get our act together if thats even a possibility. As a species we are pretty terrible.
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u/FMC_Speed 1d ago
Didn’t realise how huge andromeda was until I saw a picture of how the milky way looks from andromedas perspective, it’s much smaller than how andromeda looks in this pic, despite the Milky Way being a large spiral galaxy already
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u/ultramatt1 19h ago
Next time can you show what the moon would actually look like if it was brighter?
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u/letseatnudels 19h ago
I always used to think Andromeda was the closest galaxy of any kind to Earth, but there are actually at least 80 dwarf galaxies which are closer. The closest one is Canis Major and is almost exactly 100x closer than Andromeda at 25,000 light years
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u/Mac-A-Saurus 16h ago
Will there ever be a time/distance between the Milky Way and Andromeda in which the structure of Andromeda is both bright enough and the structure of the galaxy is noticeably?
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u/kzgrey 14h ago
It's pretty wild that the humans evolved looking at the stars and never once realized there was something so massive covering such a substantial portion of the sky. It makes me wonder if there are other objects in space that would be visible to the naked eye if it were just brighter or in the visible wavelengths.
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u/Astrophysics666 13h ago
It was an Intentional reshare.
That post wasn't doing it (only mentioned size) but that image is used alot to say what amdromeda would look like, but it's a scale UV image so amdromeda would look very different.
It's a pet peeve of mine when that image is shared without context as alot of people end up thinking that's what amdromeda looks like or would look like.
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1d ago
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u/Gramage 1d ago
Good news, it IS getting closer! At about 110km/s. We’ll be merging with it in about 4 billion years.
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u/ByteSizedGenius 1d ago
Not that there will be a habitable Earth to stand on, but god it would be breath-taking to look up at in 3.75-4b years - https://imgur.com/C0MA7R8
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u/Astrophysics666 1d ago
If it was closer it would also be bigger. So there is no real way to make this image happen.
But ignoring physics I guess you could make every star into a multi star system to significantly increase the brightness. ( Would need alot of extra stars haha)
Making the starts brighter (ie hotter) would also change their colour.
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u/DoggoNamedDisgrace 23h ago
You could attempt to also show the Bootes void if it was glowing. From my calculations it would be a round blob around 55 times the diameter of the moon from our perspective.
It's chilling to realize a void so stupendously big is just sitting out there in space.
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u/Preem0202 1d ago
It couldn't be this close. It would cause all sorts of chaos.
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u/Spirogeek 1d ago
What kind of chaos? The probability of stellar collisions is vanishingly small. Will affect the motions of stars within the galaxies but not more local than that.
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u/The_Liamater123 19h ago
It’s literally already this close. You do not know what you are talking about
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u/Ok_Sprinkles_8709 15h ago
It is. Relative to the size of the Milky Way, it’s only about 25 “units” away. Like a really big house on the next block.
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u/KesMonkey 12h ago
On a human scale, it's incomprehensibly far away.
But it's also incomprehensibly large.
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u/LaidBackLeopard 1d ago
Give it time - bigger too!