Quote:
Originally Posted by EDG_
I really love this image.
How many stars do you think we're seeing in this image? I figure if each galaxy has 100 billion stars (conservative estimate), and there's at least 1000 galaxies (again, probably an understatement), then we're seeing at least 100 trillion stars? That's a mindboggling number. How big is the field of view here?
And the funny thing is that given the distances involved (hundreds of milllions or billions of lightyears), I'd suppose that most of the stars that we're actually seeing here are long dead by now.
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At the distance of this galaxy (320 Mly), the scale is something like 0.465 kpc/" (1 kpc = 1 kiloparsec = 3262 ly, and 1" = 1 arc second = 1/3600 degrees). If NGC 4921 is 100,000 ly (~30 kpc) across, then it spans some 30 kpc/0.465 kpc/" = ~ 1 arc minute. The full field of view is ~1.5x that of the galaxy, so that takes us to about 1.5 x 1.5 arc minutes. However, somewhere the actual field of view must be given -- but I haven't found it.