Since I've seen that galaxies are often called "deep sky objects", as opposed to individual stars, does this mean that all visible stars in the night sky actually only belong to The Milky Way Galaxy?
Or are there stars which belong at least to the galaxies in the Local Group?
I always thought that Milky Way was that lighter band (since it is said that the Galaxy is a "disc"), and that other stars might be part of other galaxies.
Best Answer
Yes all the stars you can see belong to the Milky Way galaxy. The Sun is located about two-thirds of the way out from the galactic center. Thus the band across the sky known as the "Milky Way" (from whence the galaxy name came) is the main disk of the galaxy. However, all the individual stars we see are still inside that disk, we just happen to be closer to them so that they stand out as individuals.
The galactic disk has a thickness to it (about 1000-2000 light years) so the closer stars are not all in the band we see as the main disk simply because they are closer and the relative angles between the sun and these stars puts them "up" higher than the main galactic disk as seen from Earth.