• Question: how many stars are there?

    Asked by conorg1213 to Cathal, Daphne, Darren, Jon, Katherine on 18 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Katherine Haxton

      Katherine Haxton answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      It’s really difficult to count them, just as hard as it would be to count all the grains of sand on a beach. Scientists think that our galaxy has around 1 x 10^10 stars (10,000,000,000) and that there are about the same number of galaxies in the universe as stars in our galaxy. So that would be 10,000,000,000 x 10,000,000,000 stars which is about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in total or 1 x 10^22. Some are too far away to be seen from Earth so we can’t just get pictures and count.

    • Photo: Daphne Ng

      Daphne Ng answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      In fact, some scientists estimate that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth!

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