by jhunterp on August 22nd, 2006

jhunterp

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Are there more stars in space than there are grains of sand on earth?

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  • by amiableamy on August 22nd, 2006

    amiableamy

    There are about 7 billion billion grains of sand on planet Earth, while researchers are still uncertain about how many stars there are in space. An educated guess would be that there are at least 100 stars in the universe for every grain of sand on earth.

    Sources: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part8/section-3.html

    http://www.miamisci.org/tripod/whysand.html

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  • by STEF4ADAM on December 10th, 2007

    STEF4ADAM

    So how many grains of sand are there in the world? You could start
    off by trying to guess how many grains of sand there are in a spoon of
    sand. Use a magnifying glass to count how many grains fit in a small
    section. Then, count how many of those sections fit in your spoon.
    Multiply the two numbers together to get an estimate.
    "Using this same principle, plus some additional information,
    mathematicians at the University of Hawaii tried to guess how many
    grains of sand are on the world's beaches. They came up with
    7,500,000,000,000,000,000, or seven quintillion five quadrillion
    grains of sand."
    How many grains of sand are in the world?
    http://www.miamisci.org/tripod/whysand.html

    The calculation is detailed here:
    http://www.hawaii.edu/suremath/jsand.html

    That number is 7.5 x 10^18 or 7.5 billion billion.

    How many stars, galaxies, clusters, QSO's etc. in the Universe?
    http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part8/section-3.html
    "To get the total stellar population in the Milky Way [that is, in our
    galaxy alone], we must take the number of luminous stars that we can
    see at large distances and assume that we know how many fainter stars
    go along with them. Recent numbers give about 400,000,000,000 (400
    billion) stars, but a 50% error either way is quite plausible."

    So in our galaxy alone, there might be between 2 x 10^11 and 6 x 10^11 stars

    How many galaxies in the Universe?
    http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part8/section-4.html
    "the Hubble telescope is capable of detecting about 80 billion
    galaxies (although not all of these within the foreseeable future!).
    In fact, there must be many more than this, even within the observable
    Universe, since the most
    common kind of galaxy in our own neighborhood is the faint dwarfs
    which are difficult enough to see nearby, much less at large
    cosmological distances. For example, in our own local group, there are
    3 or 4 giant galaxies which would be detectable at a billion
    light-years or more (Andromeda, the Milky Way, the Pinwheel in
    Triangulum, and maybe the Large Magellanic Cloud). However, there are
    at least another 20 faint members, which would be difficult to find at
    100 million light-years, much less the billions of light years to
    which the brightest galaxies can be seen."

    So the lower end estimate for the number of galaxies is 8 x 10^10

    If we accept even the lower end of these Hubble figures, and if our
    Milky Way has a typical number of stars in it, that puts the number of
    stars in the universe to be at least
    (2 x 10^11) x (8 x 10^10) = 16 x 10^ 21

    So if we round the number of sand grains to, say, 10^20
    and round the number of stars to, say 10^22
    then there are at least 100 stars in the universe for every grain of sand on earth.

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  • by Chezter is going to save the Redheads on December 12th, 2007

    Chezter is going to save the Redheads

    Most likely yes, however, you must realize that we are seeing a lot of age old light. The actual stars may all be dead (by some highly unlikely weird cosmic event) but yeah, if most of em are still burning as long as they are supposed to be, then there's more of them than grains of sand on Earth

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  • by VSPrasad on December 11th, 2007

    VSPrasad

    Ancient Hindu texts say that the universe is infinite.

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