You Wont Believe How Many Stars are on the USA Flag
But that’s only a tiny fraction of all the stars out there. The rest are too far away for us to see them.
Yet astronomers like me have figured out how to estimate the total number of stars in the universe, which is everything that exists.
To do that, they take very detailed pictures of small parts of the sky and count all the galaxies they see in those pictures.
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15, 000 galaxies appear as small dots and blots in this NASA photograph of the nighttime sky. Each galaxy contains billions of stars.
Astronomers don’t know exactly how many stars are in each of those 2 trillion galaxies. Most are so distant, there’s no way to tell precisely.
But we can make a good guess at the number of stars in our own Milky Way. Those stars are diverse, too, and come in a wide variety of sizes and colors.
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Bigger, heavier and hotter stars tend to be blue, like Vega in the constellation Lyra. Smaller, lighter and dimmer stars are usually red, like Proxima Centauri. Except for the Sun, it’s the closest star to us.
Artist’s concept of a red dwarf star with an exoplanet in orbit. About two-thirds of the stars in the Milky Way are red dwarfs. Exoplanet is the name for worlds outside our solar system.
Red, white and blue stars give off different amounts of light. By measuring that starlight – specifically, its color and brightness – astronomers can estimate how many stars our galaxy holds.
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Now the next step. Using the Milky Way as our model, we can multiply the number of stars in a typical galaxy (100 billion) by the number of galaxies in the universe (2 trillion).
The answer is an absolutely astounding number. There are approximately 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. Or, to put it another way, 200 sextillion.
The number is so big, it’s hard to imagine. But try this: It’s about 10 times the number of cups of water in all the oceans of Earth.
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Think about that the next time you’re looking at the night sky – and then wonder about what might be happening on the trillions of worlds orbiting all those stars.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@.
But that’s only a tiny fraction of all the stars out there. The rest are too far away for us to see them.
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Yet astronomers like me have figured out how to estimate the total number of stars in the universe, which is everything that exists.
To do that, they take very detailed pictures of small parts of the sky and count all the galaxies they see in those pictures.
15, 000 galaxies appear as small dots and blots in this NASA photograph of the nighttime sky. Each galaxy contains billions of stars. NASA/ESA/P.Oesch/M.Montes
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Astronomers don’t know exactly how many stars are in each of those 2 trillion galaxies. Most are so distant, there’s no way to tell precisely.
But we can make a good guess at the number of stars in our own Milky Way. Those stars are diverse, too, and come in a wide variety of sizes and colors.
Bigger, heavier and hotter stars tend to be blue, like Vega in the constellation Lyra. Smaller, lighter and dimmer stars are usually red, like Proxima Centauri. Except for the Sun, it’s the closest star to us.
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Artist’s concept of a red dwarf star with an exoplanet in orbit. About two-thirds of the stars in the Milky Way are red dwarfs. Exoplanet is the name for worlds outside our solar system. NASA/ESA/G.Bacon/STScI
Red, white and blue stars give off different amounts of light. By measuring that starlight – specifically, its color and brightness – astronomers can estimate how many stars our galaxy holds.
Now the next step. Using the Milky Way as our model, we can multiply the number of stars in a typical galaxy (100 billion) by the number of galaxies in the universe (2 trillion).
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The answer is an absolutely astounding number. There are approximately 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. Or, to put it another way, 200 sextillion.
The number is so big, it’s hard to imagine. But try this: It’s about 10 times the number of cups of water in all the oceans of Earth.
Think about that the next time you’re looking at the night sky – and then wonder about what might be happening on the trillions of worlds orbiting all those stars.
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Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.Looking up into the night sky, you might wonder just how many stars are in the universe. It's challenging enough for an amateur astronomer to count the number of naked-eye stars that are visible and, with bigger telescopes, more stars become visible, making counting a lengthy process. So how do astronomers figure out how many stars are in the universe?
The first sticky part is trying to define what universe means, said David Kornreich, an assistant professor at Ithaca College in New York State. He was the founder of the Ask An Astronomer service at Cornell University.
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I don't know [the answer] because I don't know if the universe is infinitely large or not, he said. The observable universe appears to go back in time by about 13.8 billion years, but beyond what we could see there could be much, much more. Some astronomers also think that we may live in a multiverse where there would be other universes like ours contained in some sort of larger entity.
The simplest answer may be to estimate the number of stars in a typical galaxy, and then multiply that by the estimated number of galaxies in the universe, according to the European Agency (ESA). But even that is tricky, as some galaxies shine better in visible or some in infrared, for example. There also are estimation hurdles that must be overcome.
In October 2016, deep-field images from the Hubble Telescope suggested that there are about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, or about 10 times more galaxies than previously suggested, according to the journal Nature. In an email with Live Science, lead author Christopher Conselice, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, said there were about 100 million stars in the average galaxy.
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Telescopes may not be able to view all the stars in a galaxy, however. A 2008 estimate by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (which catalogs all the observable objects in a third of the sky) found about 48 million stars, roughly half of what astronomers expected to see. A star like our own sun may not even show up in such a catalog. So, many astronomers estimate the number of stars in a galaxy based on its mass — which has its own difficulties, since dark matter and galactic rotation must be filtered out before making an estimate.
Missions such as the Gaia mission, a European Agency probe that launched in 2013, may provide further answers. Gaia aims to precisely map about 1 billion stars in the Milky Way. It builds on the previous Hipparchus mission, which precisely located 100, 000 stars and also mapped 1 million stars to a lesser precision. Data from the mission is due to be released in June 2022, according to ESA.
Gaia will monitor each of its 1 billion target stars 70 times during a five-year period, precisely charting their positions, distances, movements and changes in brightness, ESA said on its website. Combined, these measurements will build an unprecedented picture of the structure and evolution of our galaxy. Thanks to missions like these, we are one step closer to providing a more reliable estimate to that question asked so often: 'How many stars are there in the universe?'
Astro For Kids: How Many Stars Are There In Space?
Even if we narrow down the definition to the observable universe — what we can see — estimating the number of stars within it requires knowing just how big the universe is. The first complication is that the universe itself is expanding, and the second complication is that -time can curve.
To take a simple example, light from the objects farthest away from us would take approximately 13.8 billion light-years to travel to Earth, taking into account that the very youngest objects would be shrouded because light couldn't carry in the early universe. So the radius of the observable universe should be 13.8 billion light-years since light only has that long to reach us.
Or should it? It's a logical way to define distance, but not how a relativist
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