Stars confuse me! please help?

Question

On a clear night, you can see about 1,000 stars with your naked eye. These stars are all part of the Milky Way Galaxy. The average bright star is a few dozen parsecs away, but some of them are a few hundred or even more than a thousand parsecs away.

To which population of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy do you think that the bright, naked eye stars belong? Which population of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy are you not likely to be able to see at all with your naked eye? With your eyes are you seeing a large portion of the Galaxy or a small portion?

Answer 1

OK, this sounds like homework, but I'll help you out anyway.

The solar system is right in the middle of the disk of the Milky Way, which is about 1000 parsecs thick.  Most of the stars in the disk are Pop I (that's roman numeral 1).

The Pop II stars are old, and so all the massive, bright Pop II stars have long since burned out.

The luminosity of stars varies greatly---the youngest, brightest, and most massive are a thousand times more luminous than small old stars.

Answer 2

We can only see a very small (about 1/25 if that) percentage of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy with the naked eye. Our solar system is located on the edge of one of the spirals and we cannot see what is on the other side of our galaxy because the center of our galaxy is a black hole. It is Absorbing all light from those stars. Even some of the most powerful earth based telescopes can't see more than 1/15 of the stars in the galaxy. It's just that large.  Telescopes like the Hubble and others can see farther though I don't know of their exact range.

Answer 3

The stars that appear in the sky as individual points of light are all relatively close to the Sun, in galactic terms. Most of them are simply too far away to be discernible on their own, and can only be seen when millions of them are collected together in one area to create a glowing patch in the sky. Also, brighter stars are much more likely to be seen at longer distances, while dimmer stars are much harder to see. Red dwarfs, although making up the majority of all the stars in the Universe, are so dim that no red dwarf (even Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun) can be seen with the naked eye. White dwarfs are slightly brighter, but again none can be seen from Earth with the naked eye; they are also quite a bit rarer than red dwarfs. Most of the stars we see in the sky are probably white and blue giants, because they emit much more light than smaller stars and are thus visible from a much greater distance, despite being among the least common types of stars (not counting unusual stellar objects such as neutron stars and black holes).

Answer 4

It depends on your vision!-- at a dark site you can see M31 the Andromeda Galaxy which is 2.5 million light years away-- looks like a "fuzzy" star. Let's say you can see objects as faint as 6.5 magnitude------ some of those are 30,000 light years away (the Messier object globulars for example)-- Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across. (I assume you are far away from light pollution.)