Walter Carel, Jr., age 10, of Chamblee, Georgia, for s quest on:
How many stars are there in outer space
No one has ever counted all the stars. Hence we can only estimate how many of them there are. What's more, every day the scientists are learning more and more about the starry heavens. The estimates given ten or even five years ago are already out of date. As in most sciences, today's answers are tomorrow's questions.
The stars are separated from each other by vast oceans of space : The nearest star to our sun is about 26 million, million miles away. However, these lonely stars are not scattered halter skelter throughout the vastness of space. They are arranged in star systems.
The star system in which we live has a number of names. It is called the Milky Way system, the Galaxy, a spiral nebula and an Island Universe. It is made from stars, dust and star lit gases. The giant star system is shaped somewhat like a pinwheel. The center of the flat disk is thickest. From the center, two star spattered arms spiral out towards the rim. This spiraling shape explains why our huge star system is called a spiral nebula.
We call it the Milky Way because of that pale glimmering arch we sometimes see over the night sky. When we gaze at this pale Milky Way in the sky, we are looking out across our vast star system. It does not look like a hugs wheel of stars because we have an edgewise view. The telescope shows that it is made from teeming faraway stars so far away that their light blends and blurs in a milky glow.
Can we count the stars in the Milky Way? No indeed. For one thing, large patches of the glimmering arch are hidden by dark clouds of gas. We can only estimate the number of stars in the Big Wheel.
Most experts agree that there are about 100 billion of them. And most of them are large enough to swallow our little earth a million times *
It would take you many years to count to 100 billion but that is not all the stars in outer space. In a very real sense, our Milky Way is merely an Island Universe, one island of starts in the vast, vast oceans of space. There are other such starry islands, many, many of them. Our telescopes have photographed thousands of them. Many of them are as large as our Milky Way and some of them are much larger. This means that they too have billions of stars.
At the present time, the astronomers estimate that there are at least one million, million island universes scattered throughout the heavens. Let's say that each of them has about 100 billion stars. To find the number of stars in outer space we must multiply this number by a million, million. The answer, of course, is simple. There are as many stars in outer space as there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.