• 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 don’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 is…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. That’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, I’m not a physicist, but I’m gonna go ahead here and say… Lots. There are lots of stars. Very scientific answer.

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