Look at the object circled in this picture:

Can you see a bit of a blur around it? That’s because it’s not a star… it’s a trillion stars.

This is the Andromeda Galaxy, the closest really big galaxy to our home, the Milky Way.

Here’s what you get when the Hubble Space Telescope points at this little blur to get a REALLY high resolution picture:

That’s a taste of what 1,000,000,000,000 stars looks like.

At 125 million light years away, it’s just down the corner.

The smudge you see in the photo about is just the center of Andromeda. This is what it would look like if it was bright enough to see the whole thing. Even at 2.5 million light years away, this thing is huge  – much bigger than the moon in our night sky.

By the way… our Milky Way will collide with Andromeda in 4 billion years.