• Question: How many stars are there?

    Asked by flynn13 to Arlene, Colin, David, Eugene, Paul on 15 Nov 2012. This question was also asked by thejayman33.
    • Photo: Colin Johnston

      Colin Johnston answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      OK, let’s take that a bit at a time:

      The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (Google it) is one of the most amazing pictures ever. It shows a tiny fraction of the entire sky, just 1/13,000, 000 of the whole celestial sphere (a sort of imaginary shell covering the whole sky).

      The Hubble Ultra Deep Field contains 10000 galaxies. Putting these together we can say there are about 10000 x 13,000,000 galaxies in the sky= 130, 000, 000, 000 galaxies (130 billion galaxies).

      Each galaxy has about 100, 000, 000, 000 (a hundred billion stars), multiplying these we get

      13,000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000,000 stars in the observable Universe. (Roughly)

    • Photo: David McKeown

      David McKeown answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      Great answer Colin!

      Some scientist say that the brightest star the in the universe is Beyonce Knowles

    • Photo: Paul Higgins

      Paul Higgins answered on 18 Nov 2012:

      And that is just the stars we can actually see! The universe is probably infinite. Also, more stars are being born all the time in big clouds of collapsing gas out in space.

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