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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."

1 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I've figured out the population of the world. by Bootsy+Collins · · Score: 4, Insightful

    By calculating the population of my neighborhood and assuming that my neighborhood has average distribution...

    From the article:
    > That number was then multiplied by the number of similar sized strips
    > needed to cover the entire sky, Driver said, and then multiplied again
    > out to the edge of the visible universe.

    I wonder if this sort of "science" is how hardware manufacturers get their numbers?

    Be careful. Do you have a reason to believe that your neighborhood is typical? Do you have data indicating such?

    The astronomers in question didn't use such an approach because they're idiots; they used such an approach because we already have a heck of a lot of data about the galaxy distribution. The RMS (fractional) fluctuation in galaxy number count in a random volume the size of the one they surveyed is expected to be tiny; and it's expected to be tiny because of surveys we've already done which indicate such a convergence towards homogeneity as scale increases.