If you're like most people, you've probably wondered occasionally how many stars are visible in the night sky. And again, if you are like most people, you've probably given up any attempt to count them, finding them not only too numerous for efficient counting, but also spread on such a grand sweep of background that the task seems overwhelming. And that's without even mentioning that counting stars is something of a moving target, as some seem to be visible for a while and then not so later.
Turning to astronomers does little to help us come up with a meaningful number of stars. Some estimates (based on a guess that there are 10 trillion galaxies in the universe with an estimated 100 billion stars each) put the number at around 100 octillion stars -- that's 1 with 29 zeros after it. Other studies have suggested around 300 sextillion stars, or a 3 followed by 23 zeros.
David Kornreich, a professor at Ithaca College and founder of the "Ask an Astronomer" service at Cornell University,...
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