Space, it’s an awfully big place with more stars than Hollywood On
these clear winter’s nights, I often find myself gazing in wonder at the night sky.
I even saw some meteors on Thursday night, a spectacular sight indeed.
However, what I really find truly awesome are the stars, far too many tocount.
So that’s where you come in, Queries Man – just how many stars are there in the Milky Way and the entire universe? – M.
Now that’s a really tough question, as there are so many, you can’t simply count them one by one.
The Milky Way, in which our solar system resides, is a barred spiral galaxy about 100,000 lightyears across.
The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission is mapping the locations of approximately one billion stars in the Milky Way.
The agency says Gaia will map 1% of the stellar content in the Milky Way, which puts the estimate of the total stars in our galaxy at 100 billion.
Gaia’s goal is to make a threedimensional map of the Milky Way.
As for the universe, there are about 10 billion observable galaxies.
The number of stars in a galaxy varies, but assuming an average of 100 billion stars per galaxy means that there are approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that’s 1 billion, trillion) stars in the observable universe.
However, even this is an underestimate as, when more sensitive telescopes are invented, they will reveal fainter galaxies and stars, deeper in space.