A starry night in the celestial vault and suddenly we ended up anchored to that very distant reality. We look towards the sky and in that place that seemed covered only with blackness, little by little it is filled with brilliant sparkles that flicker more and more before our eyes. Suddenly, an entire universe has revealed itself to our existence and unknowns begin to crawl through our minds. How distant are they? Do they move? And suddenly the question arises: how many stars are there really there in the Universe?
This is certainly a somewhat ambitious question; first we must ask ourselves if we are really capable of estimating the number of stars. But for the scientists most passionate about the cosmos, nothing is 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 straight into the immensity, but order is important. First you have to go from the general to the particular.
Galaxy cluster captured by the
First thing’s first
There are millions of varieties of , 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 animals, 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, we must first count the number of galaxies as it will help us enormously in the process.
To do this, astronomers capture 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 in turn multiplied by the number of photographs necessary to cover the sky in its entirety. 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 forest example, we have to imagine that life forms are not limited to the large animals we observe. If not, each one of them is in itself, an ecosystem of microorganisms. The same thing happens with galaxies, since each of them houses millions of stars.
Hubble
counting the stars
Astronomers do not know with certainty 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 .
Thanks to the fact that stars shine in different ways depending on the material of which they are composed, experts can quantify the light and with this make an estimate of how many stars the star has. According to calculations, in our great cosmic neighborhood there are an astonishing number of 100,000,000,000 stars, or what is equal to one hundred billion stars.
If your arithmetic intuition has you right, then you can imagine that the next step is to multiply this number by the estimated number of galaxies in the Universe. By multiplying 100 billion stars by 2 trillion galaxies, we get a colossal and absolutely astonishing number. In the Universe there are approximately 200 thousand trillion stars or what is equal to 200 sextillions:
200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
What a lot of zeros! We know that our mental structure is not used to thinking in such numbers and imagining it may be somewhat impossible. But to put it in context so you can get a clearer idea, the number of stars in the Universe is roughly equivalent to 10 times the number of cups in all of Earth’s oceans. It’s still colossal, right? But at least a little more understandable.