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

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."

Comments

Re:seti@homing it up

[i_am_nitrogen]

I bought Hyperspace used and it is indeed a very thought provoking reading. There are probably some newer theories that aren't discussed in the book, but it's still pretty decent popular science. One thing I didn't like about it is in some parts the author seems to try to aggressively imply that there is proof that God doesn't exist, when of course, such proof is currently impossible to obtain using current methods and technology, as is proof that God does exist.

It's quite similar to what SCO is trying to do. Some scientists and others apparently believed that if they say it loud enough long enough, eventually it will be accepted as truth. Guess what: in large part, it worked. In reality, there cannot be a proof for everyone that God does or does not exist. The only way to find out is to look for yourself.

Some other numbers for comparison

[notyou2]

30-60 sextillion: The combined number of cells in every living human being on the planet.

51 sextillion: The number of grains of sand it would take to cover the entire planet once.

-- CALCULATED FROM --
There are 6 billion people on the planet. Web searches yielded varying figures of approximately 50-100 trillion cells per human being. The "average" grain of sand is 100 microns across (and I grossly approximated a sand grain as being square).

Approaching Avogadro's number

[notyou2]

That's almost spooky... Avogadro's number is approximately 600 sextillion.

What if it turns out that, after taking into account all the dark matter, the universe contains Avogadro's number of "large objects"? (stars, planets, whatever)

Could the universe turn out to be nothing more than one mole of stars? :)

Re:if it's a million million million,

[nomel]

Remember, the visible universe is growing by a lightyear every year as light is just hitting us from very distant stars. :)

Ponder this

[DigiShaman]

Throughout an entire human lifetime, the collective count of every neuron transmission in the brain will never reach the total amount of stars in the universe! So even if we had the physical means to travel to all of the stars, our mental capacity would be the limiting factor.