There are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy. There are about 200 trillion galaxies in the parts of the universe that are observable from earth. Which is to say, galaxies outnumber the stars in our galaxy by about 20 to 1.
If we limit it to stars we can see with the naked eye, then instead of 100 billion stars, you’re down to something like 5,000 to 10,000 stars depending where on earth you are observing from. In which case galaxies in the observable universe outnumber the stars we can see about 20 billion to 1.
The whole universe? Absolutely. Even the smallwst infinity is larger than any countable sum.
The visible universe, meaning those close enough that a photon could have passed from there to here since the “big bang” faded enough to allow such transmissal? I don’t know offhand.
A simple web search suggest that our galaxy has less than 1011 stars – 400,000,000,000 or so. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way )
Finding our other figure is a bit harder, since trusty Wikipedia doesn’t include a direct figure and the first few articles I could find was from the BBC and used number names instead of scientific notation, which is ambiguous at this scale. ( in the long scale we only have milliardaires, and Elon Musk’s brief paper fortune was a billion rather than trillion.)
Thankfully a NASA articke linked to what appears to be the underlying research paper, and gives us a helpful number of 2x1012. (2,000,000,000,000)
So, if the paper is right then, yes, there are more galaxies in the observable universe than stars in the Milky Way. But, the paper was an indirect measurement that increased the galaxy count by a whole order of magnitude, so there may be only 2x1011 galaxies. Except, of course, that the estimate of stars in the miky way was an estimate and could be as little as 1/4 of the number I cited above…
And if the paper is wrong and the truth of the estimate is in the middle, both of our numbers could be 2x1011, with approximately one star in our galaxy for every galaxy in the observable universe.
The whole universe? Absolutely. Even the smallwst infinity is larger than any countable sum.
Sorry, I don’t understand. Surely the number of galaxies is not infinite?
Our models do not specify a shape for the universe, because we have not seen any evidence for a spatial (as opposed to temporal) limit to how big the universe is.
In fact, we infer that since what we can see becomes homogenous on a surprisingly small scale, the whole infinite universe is similarly filled with galactic clusters, and thus there is an (unreachable) infinite number of galaxies.
This quickly gets into the weeds of “can we even say trees fall in the forests of planets no humans will ever observe”, possibly followed by an argument over if infinites are equal or comparable.
Stop eating galaxies lol
Yes
He’s right you know. The answer is yes.
Fun fact, there are more trees on earth than stars in our galaxy.
Not for that if we keep going the way we are.
the earth is more forested now than it was 100 years ago. but don’t let that fact get in the way of your doomer nonsense.
With the naked eye or with a telescope are two very different questions.
But the answer to either question is “more galaxies in the universe.” Estimate of galaxies in the observable universe is 2 trillion. The Milky Way contains at most 400 billion stars, most of which will not be visible with either the naked eye or a telescope.
I haven’t been to all of them, but from what I hear, yes.
Fun fact the closest neighbor galaxy is your mom’s fat ass.
That black hole in the centre will eat anything
