• Question: are there more stars in the sky or grains on the sand?

    Asked by yo_momma to Andy, Dwaine, Natt, Priya, Tatiana on 25 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Andrew Scott

      Andrew Scott answered on 25 Jun 2015:

      Both numbers are massive! I have no idea, but a quick google suggest something like 1000000000000000000000000 stars, (24 zeros, or a septillion) as a minimum! Some of the galaxies alone have trillions, but we can’t see all of them! This makes me think that there must be other life out there…

      The grains of sand is another estimate based on lots of reasonable guesses (average % of coastline that is beach and average size [length and depth] of beach) and the total length of all coastlines. Anyway, the people that have done it come up with about 5 sextillion (21 zeros!).

      So there are more stars. But! there are probably more atoms in one grain of sand than there are stars in the sky.

      I got most of the information from these articles, quite interesting:

      http://www.universetoday.com/106725/are-there-more-grains-of-sand-than-stars/
      http://www.universetoday.com/102630/how-many-stars-are-there-in-the-universe/

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