More Stars than Grains of Sand
There are more stars than grains of sand on all of Earth’s deserts and beaches.
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Hold a grain of sand at arm’s length. That’s the size of the enlarged speck of sky pictured to the left.
The image, known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in late 2003. A larger image can be seen here: 20MB Image. |
Zooming in reveals something startling: each of those blobs of light isn’t a star; it’s an entire galaxy…
…and the average galaxy contains about 500 billion stars.
It’s hard to put a number that big in perspective, but I’ll try: start counting one star per second when you’re born and you’ll hit one billion when you’re 31 and a half years old. Do it 500 times and you have a single galaxy covered.
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Seventy Sextillion StarsSo, astronomers at the Australian National University used simliar imaging to extrapolate the number of stars in the known visible universe. And (drumroll, please…) they came up with 70 sextillion. Yeah, I know it sounds risqué, but that’s a real live number. It’s 70,000 million million million, is what it is. That’s at least ten times as many stars as grains of sand on all the world’s beaches and all the world’s deserts. Think about it next time you’re shaking out your beach towel. |
Read More: astronomy, science, Hubble, Hubble Telescope, stars, sand
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