70 Sextillion Stars!

[Az]

hhhhh... he said 'sex'... hhhhhhh

[/butthead]

actually, I don't think it's such a difficult calculation. You count up how many galaxies of each kind do you see ( this is the hard part. ) multiply accordingly, and add up.

[DAVOUT]

Originally posted by GePap
7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 is a real number!

Looks more like the number of particles in the universe.

[Q Classic]

but it just doesn't sound as cool as "googleplex". marketing, people.

looks like we'll have to edit the old tried and true and quite nice sagan line. "billions and billions of stars" to something more akin to "billions times billions of stars".

[Boris Godunov]

Keep in mind that 70 sextillion is something like 10,000 times the number of grains of sand on Earth. That's a lot!

[Sava]

And this is only the number of stars visible to us. I suspect there are an infinite number of stars in the Cosmos.

[Az]

If there was an infinite number of stars, the universe would've collapsed.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Azazel
If there was an infinite number of stars, the universe would've collapsed.

Shhh, let him have his fantasy!

[Sava]

Shhh, let him have his fantasy!

Sorry, until evidence suggest otherwise...

[Sava]

oh, and BTW Boris, my dynamic understanding of the universe is in line with Hawking's writings... which is a combination of Steady-State and Big Bang theories. Frankly, your certainty that I'm wrong represents the same unsubstantiated faith as religion. You need an open mind.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Sava
Sorry, until evidence suggest otherwise...

Uh, what evidence support your theory?

Think about it...Infinite stars would mean infinite mass, which would mean everything would collapse on itself.

It would also mean the sky would be so bright from the stars we'd see nothing else, and the universe so irradiated that nothing living would exist.

[Boris Godunov]

Which of Hawking's theories suggests there is an infinite number of stars?

[Sava]

Which of Hawking's theories suggests there is an infinite number of stars?

He doesn't make a conclusion either way... according to "Origin of the Universe" by Stephen W. Hawking
Copyright 1988... it is more likely there is infinite matter, and that we can only detect a limited number of stars.

[Sava]

oh and for the whole "sky being bright" thing... stars don't live forever... when they die, they cease to emit light... so we wouldn't see every star in the sky, there is a finite amount of time in which light is emmited. And distance is another factor. I suspect if we traveled to the farthest detectable star, we'd see more stars in that direction that we normally wouldn't see from our current vantage point.

[Proteus_MST]

A lot of them could also be so young and they are so far away, that their light hasn´t yet reached Earth

[Sava]

Originally posted by Proteus_MST
A lot of them could also be so young and they are so far away, that their light hasn´t yet reached Earth

And many are long dead and we can't see their light...

Imagine it like this... if you were to put a recording device in space, and record the stars from a single position over billions of years, but play it back in extreme fast forward, it would look like a night sky filled with fireflies.... blinking on and off all over.