• Question: How many stars are there in the universe, thanks šŸ˜

    Asked by 855furk43 to Chris, Joanne, Kathryn, Kieran, Sarah on 10 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Chris Werner

      Chris Werner answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      We may never really know as the universe is so large we donā€™t really even know how big it is! Easiest thing is to break it down a bit. In our Milky Way galaxy there are anywhere between 200 and 400 billion stars. Now think about how many that isā€¦a lot! Now its estimated that there could be anywhere between 200 billion and 2 TRILLION galaxies!!! Galaxies are all different sizes, but lets assume for simplicity that there is exactly 400 billion stars in each of the 2 trillion galaxies. Thats roughly 8*10^23. Thatā€™s 8 with 23 zeros after it or 800 sextillion stars, at a very rough guess!!

    • Photo: Kathryn Schoenrock

      Kathryn Schoenrock answered on 11 Nov 2017:

      In our galaxy, the Milky Way, I think there is somewhere near 100 thousand million. That is 100,000,000,000 or 10 to the 11th, and most of them are clustered in a misty band that you can see on a really clear night.

      This is a really good website for space photos: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

    • Photo: Joanne Duffy

      Joanne Duffy answered on 12 Nov 2017:

      Eh, Iā€™m not a physicist, but Iā€™m gonna go ahead here and sayā€¦ Lots. There are lots of stars. Very scientific answer.

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