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70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Stars Out There

Posted by michael on from the fermi's-paradox dept.

ChopsMIDI writes "Ever wanted to wish upon a star? Well, you have 70,000 million million million to choose from. That's the total number of stars in the known universe, according to a study by Australian astronomers. It's also about 10 times as many stars as grains of sand on all the world's beaches and deserts."

2 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. That's One Amazing factoid! by GuyMannDude · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    I never knew that Australia had astronomers!

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    watch this
  2. wow, bogus science by haz-mat · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    so that estimation is highly suspect. let us begin with the most trivial and work out; first of all the scientists who conducted this survey summed the number of stars they saw in a strip and then added the number of stars that were in each of the 10,000 galaxies they saw. however, you can not see all the stars in each in galaxy, nor can you even see all the light emitted from each galaxy due to inclination and extinction. thus they must have estimated the number of stars based on the mass of the galaxy, aside from the fact that massing a galaxy returns a questionable answering, they must have assumed that the stars were of some certain mass probably around a solar mass, which is an inaccurate assumption, to say the least. Next, these so called scientists took the total number of stars (guessed at) in the strip of sky they surveyed and multiplied it by the total number of strips needed to fill the sky, this is essentially the technique one uses to estimate total number of people in a crowd, however the greates flaw in this method is one assumes that the universe is uniformly distributed! and this is a gross misrepresentation. Finally, the survey made use of two ground based telescopes and the fact is that they only counted the total number of 'visible' stars and they're visible stars are stars visible on the ground which means that they have counted nearby and fairly bright objects.

    so, i don't know how many stars are out there, the errors that are easily identifiable may have cancelled each other out, but more than likely these folks are way off with either way more or way less stars than the 70 sextillion CNN touts. However, this is all useless, why would you want to know the total number of stars in the universe, what possible value can it have? seems to be just a boondoggle to me...