Gallaxies - clouds of stars or of particles?

[Siggy_G]

I realize this may seem far fetched, but from looking at images of galaxies, there is a few things I've never been completely convinced about.

How can we for sure know and interpret all of the "pixel noise" in galaxy images as stars? Couldn't this be fragmented fog or dust plasma? Do there exist any hi-res images that clearly and actually shows that there are millions of *stars* within the galaxies?

It's something about the suggested distances between each star, and what visually appear in a galaxy that doesn't make sense. And that is even if you take projected depth layers of stars into consideration. The stars (or particles) just seems to be too dense to be anything near a few light years between each other.

To be direct, I'm suspecting galaxies don't consist of millions of stars, but are not any different from other galactic fog or remains from exploded stars, that just happens to be in a twirling orbit.

Another thing, being a digital artist, I know a thing or two about image processing. Believe me, many of the images posted by NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team are heavily post processed. I'm not just talking about combining different images from different electromagnetic ranges. That part is fine. But too many images
bear the look of being reproduced. At best, the purpose is to reproduce what is seen. At worst, it's pure fake for the purpose of showing nice results and keep getting funding. From a scientifical point of view, the latter is extremely disappointing.

Personally, I'd prefer to see most of the source material. 90% of the images available out there, in books or on the internet, are post processed for our viewing pleasure... And you can't really know if it's portraying the truth.

[junglelord]

Well that thought has crossed my mind more then once. Looking at the pictures...well it kinda begs the question.
Some look clearly like stars, more looks like dust. Sure there are both, but the dust seems to heavily outweigh the stars.
As far as doctored photos, why not, they doctor everything else.

[Siggy_G]

To elaborate a bit on the distance between the stars, or pixels if you like, in a galaxy:

Take the distance between the Sun and the nearest star, Alpha Centauri - being 4,3 light years away. If the Sun was one white pixel in the middle of your monitor, you'd have to place about 2000 monitors on the side of yours (with a typical screen resolution of 1600*1200) before you could spot the next white pixel, being Alpha Centauri.

It then seems puzzling to me that we can see such dense scattering of star within galaxy images, even taking over exposure and increased image brightness into account. Considering the "thickness" of a galaxy, there can't be too many stars in this direction either.

Isn't it more probable that the pixel noise is bright particles (even self illuminated)? Can radiation be traced within each galaxy, to the extend that one can tell that each point has individual hydrogen/helium-specters, being red shifted and all that - proving that the points are stars? I doubt it.

[flyingcloud]

wouldn't a two dimensional picture obscure the actual distance between stars that occur in three dimensional space, just sayin