Counting stars
HOW MANY STARS ARE THERE IN THE UNIVERSE?
WITH A FLEET OF MISSIONS SCOURING THE COSMOS, WILL IT EVER BE POSSIBLE TO COME TO AN ESTIMATE?
Reported by Ailsa Harvey
Looking up into the night sky, you might wonder just how many stars are in the universe. It’s challenging enough for an amateur astronomer to count the number of naked-eye stars that are visible, and with bigger telescopes, more stars come into view, making counting them a lengthy process. So how do astronomers figure out how many stars are in the universe?
The first tricky part is trying to define what ‘universe’ means, says David Kornreich, a professor at Ithaca College in New York State. He was also the founder of the ‘Ask An Astronomer’ service at Cornell University. “I don’t know, because I don’t know if the universe is infinitely large or not,” he said. The observable universe appears to go back in time by about 13.8 billion years, but beyond what we could see there could be much more. Some astronomers also think that we may live in a ‘multiverse’, where there would be other universes like ours contained in some sort of larger entity.
The simplest answer may be to estimate the number of stars in a typical galaxy, and then multiply that by the estimated number of galaxies in the universe. But even that is difficult, as some galaxies shine better in visible light or in infrared There are also estimation hurdles that must be overcome. In October 2016, deep-field images from the Hubble Space Telescope suggested that there are about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, or about ten times more galaxies than previously suggested. Speaking with All About Space, the lead author of a new study published in Nature, Christopher Conselice, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Manchester in the UK, says there are about 100 million stars in the average galaxy.