When we look at photo's of the centre of the Milky Way, it looks extremely bright due to the concentraion of star systems...
If our solar system was only 100 light years from the centre of the Galaxy, would we still have a dark night sky?
Astronomy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for astronomers and astrophysicists. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityWhen we look at photo's of the centre of the Milky Way, it looks extremely bright due to the concentraion of star systems...
If our solar system was only 100 light years from the centre of the Galaxy, would we still have a dark night sky?
I have tried to collate some info from various other answers.
Density of stars where we are:
Density of stars "at the middle of the galaxy". Unfortunately I don't know how "100 ly" affects this. It's probably about this figure.
So in this QA it's "about 500x as dense".
It would seem that this is in fact:
However the overwhelming factor is
How likely would it be, in the region under discussion, that another star is "very" close to us - close enough that that one particular star is extremely bright?
The answer seems to be
That seems to be the bottom line.
(There's a completely pointless, if pretty, image here showing what it's like "inside a star cluster" {where? At what depth?} here Unfortunately that image does not simply state the star density they are simulating - so it is of no help at all to this excellent QA!)
the bottom line then:
To improve on this answer, the next thing we need to quantify is one piece of information:
Is it 50, 100, 25, 300, 72.275 stars per cubic parsec?
I don't know.