If you were to travel in a spaceship from our galaxy, The Milky Way, to our nearest major galactic neighbor, Andromeda, and at the halfway point you were to look out the windows in all directions, what would you see?
The answer is most probably not much.
You would see almost total blackness, with a few faint smudges of light here and there. Those smudges of light would be “nearby” galaxies.
The Reason
To help understand this, consider a couple of facts. If you look into the night sky, right now, and look at Andromeda, what do you see? It’s a tiny faint smudge of light, barely visible to the naked eye.
If you travel halfway there, it would still look pretty small to the naked eye. And if you look back at the Milky Way from that point, it would be just like Andromeda, a tiny faint smudge of light.
Other galaxies are even farther away, so they would be either extremely faint, or invisible to the naked eye.
And there are no stars out there. For the most part, stars are in the galaxies, and not between them.
There you go - total darkness, except for a few small smudges of light, which are the closest galaxies.
I completely agree with this fact. On a moonless night with clear skies and far away from light pollution, we can see the entire sky lit up with stars, we can see the band of the Milky Way. Similarly, in the intergalactic space we can see lot of faint galaxies like dots. They would not appear as bright as stars we see from Earth, but still I think we can see a lot of them as our pupil dilates in darkness and allows maximum amount of light to reach the retina.
The Mathematics
The best human eye is capable of seeing objects with magnitude of approximately 7 or less. (Lesser is brighter, greater is dimmer)
In the night sky here on earth, there are a total of 6 galaxies, besides the Milky Way and Andromeda, that are visible to the naked eye under the best of conditions.
The best of conditions include no moon, dark sky away from any light pollution, high altitude, and no adverse weather.
Those galaxies mentioned all have magnitudes of 7 or less.
All other galaxies in the universe have magnitudes greater than 7 (dimmer) beyond the sensitivity of the human eye under the best conditions.
The End Notes
Okay so. Here's whatever I found on many Cosmology groups around Facebook. I hope that this will increase a bit of your interest in Space and Cosmos. Please do leave your views on comment section. So that, I can know what your views and visions. That's all in this article.
Cheers!
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