How many stars are there in space?

Have you ever asked yourself existential questions like, how many planets, galaxies or constellations are there? If that’s the case, rest assured, you’re not alone: ​​in order to answer a netizen’s question, an American researcher revealed Calculation method for estimating the number of stars in the universe. The result is very big Our poor human minds can’t imagine that Without making complicated comparisons.

We must first count the galaxies

As we can imagine, making such a calculation does not happen in an instant. She certainly is It is impossible to know exactly how many stars there are inUniverse (This means in…literally everything that exists) Much of it is remote.

To get a rough figure, Brian Jackson of Boise State University says you have to take it step by step. in a Column posted in the conversation, he explains:Before counting the number of stars in the universe, astronomers must First estimate of the number of galaxiesA key word to remember: “estimate.”

The world continues:To achieve this, they take highly detailed pictures of small parts of the sky and count how many galaxies they see in those images.A hugely boring post that would give us an approximate figure of 2 trillion… either 2,000,000,000,000,000 galaxies ! Does the number give you a headache? Take a breath because we’re only in the first step.

unimaginable character

The rest is more complicated: In order to estimate how many stars there are in each galaxy (we’re still talking about an estimate), Brian Jackson points out that astronomers look at light emitted by stars To count their number in the galaxy.

Therefore, we transfer scientific calculations and scientific methods to reach the information that interests us, and how many stars there are in total! And it is not surprising that the number obtained is amazing: 200 sextillions, or … 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars !

The scale of scale is much larger than our brains. So Brian Jackson offers a small, well-founded comparison to help us model such a number: According to him, this number is equivalent to 10 times the number of cups of water needed to fill the Earth’s oceans.