A starry night in the celestial vault and suddenly we ended up anchored to that far away reality. We direct our gaze towards the sky and in that place that seemed covered only with blackness, little by little it is filled with resplendent sparkles that flicker more and more before our eyes. Suddenly, an entire universe has revealed itself in front of our existence and the unknowns begin to creep through the mind. How far apart are they? do they move? And suddenly the question arises: how many stars are there really in the Universe?
This is certainly a somewhat ambitious question, one would first have to ask whether we are really capable of estimating the number of stars. But for the scientists who are most passionate about the cosmos, there are no such things as impossible and they have embarked on the adventure of counting the number of stars that inhabit the Universe. But they couldn’t achieve it by diving headlong into the immensity, rather order is important. First you have to go from the general to the particular.
Galaxy cluster captured by Hubble
First thing’s first
There are millions of varieties of galaxies in the cosmos, in different unimaginable ways, although we can compare them with what we know. Egg shapes, multicolored gas jets or spirals. Just as a forest is rich in animal biodiversity, so is space with galaxies. But how important are galaxies? Well, in order to estimate an approximate number of all the stars that lie in the Universe, first you have to count the number of galaxies because it will help us enormously in the process.
To do this, astronomers take highly detailed images of small segments of the visible sky and count all the galaxies that appear in those celestial photographs. And the resulting number is multiplied in turn by the number of photographs needed to cover the entire sky. A surprising number results from these calculations, since it is estimated that there are about 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies in the Universe, that is, 2 billion galaxies.
But if we think back to the example of the forest, we have to imagine that the forms of life are not limited to the large animals that we observe. If not that each one of them is in itself, an ecosystem of microorganisms itself. The same happens with galaxies, since each of them is home to millions of stars.
hubble
counting the stars
Astronomers do not know for sure the number of stars that inhabit each galaxy, that would be crazy precision, since many of them are billions of light years away. But they can estimate how many of them are housed in our own galaxy, the great Milky Way.
Because stars shine in different ways depending on the material they are made of, experts can quantify the light and thereby estimate how many stars the Milky Way has. According to calculations, in our great cosmic neighborhood there are an astonishing 100,000,000,000 stars, or what is equal to one hundred billion stars.
If your arithmetic intuition has hit the nail on the head, then you can imagine that the next step is to multiply this number by the estimated number of galaxies in the Universe. Multiplying 100 billion stars by the 2 trillion galaxies, we get a colossal and absolutely staggering number. In the Universe there are approximately 200 thousand trillion stars or what is equal to 200 sextillion:
200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
What a number of zeros! We know that our mental structure is not used to thinking in such numbers and imagining it can be somewhat impossible. But to put it in context so that you can get a clearer idea, the number of stars in the Universe is roughly equivalent to 10 times the number of cups of water in all of Earth’s oceans. It’s still colossal, isn’t it? But at least a little more understandable.
It might interest you