There are more stars in space than there are grains of sand in the world. - FactzPedia

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There are more stars in space than there are grains of sand in the world.

 

There are more stars in space than there are grains of sand in the world.



There are 10 times more stars in the night sky than grains of sand on the Earth, with 70 sextillion stars being visible from Earth through a telescope.

To put that in numbers, 70 sextillion is this: 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

It may hurt your brain to think about it, but it seems that the answer is likely to be yes, or at least the numbers are roughly in the same ballpark.

Astronomers actually set out to answer this question about a decade ago. It's a tricky problem to solve, but it's slightly easier if you throw in a couple of qualifiers — that we're talking about stars in the observable universe; and grains of sand on the entire planet, not just the beaches.

The scientists started by measuring the luminosity density of a section of the universe — this is a measurement of how much light is in that space.

They then used this measurement to estimate the number of stars required to create that amount of light. This was quite a mathematical challenge!

"You have to assume that you can have one type of star represent all types of stars," says astronomer Simon Driver, Professor at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Western Australia and one of the scientists who worked on the question.

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