• Question: how many stars are there in space? :)

    Asked by motzandgokz4evz to Alexis, Dr D, Helen, Jasmine, Mario on 26 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Andrew Devitt

      Andrew Devitt answered on 26 Jun 2013:

      I have no idea. Give me a minute while I look an answer to this great question. I’ve looked at the sky and wondered this in the past. Never thought to try and find an answer, until now.

      OK – so experts think there are millions of stars in our galaxy. And there are lots of galaxies. I think a lot of this is guess work.

      They think 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) to 1000 billion (a trillion) stars in our galaxy. So then if you multiply this by the number of galaxies they guess are in existence, you probably get up to a trillion trillion stars (1 followed by 24 zeros).

      These sorts of numbers give you brain ache and you’ve got to fancy that there’s life somewhere out there around these stars!

    • Photo: Alexis Barr

      Alexis Barr answered on 26 Jun 2013:

      All of the stars are in space! As for an actual number – we can only really guess. A VERY rough estimate would be 1000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

    • Photo: Jasmine Penny

      Jasmine Penny answered on 26 Jun 2013:

      Like Andrew and Alexis – I had no idea what the answer to this was either! I don’t think we can really know the exact amount either! Apparently our galaxy (the Milky Way) has about 200 billion stars. In the universe astronomers believe Astronomers believe there are probably somewhere between 1 sextillion (21 zeros) and 1 septillion (24 zeros) stars. These numbers look like this: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!

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