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Like the number of grains of sand on the beach or angels that can dance on the head of a pin, the number of stars in the sky remains a great unknown. Discussing the number of stars in the Milky Way alone, astronomer William Keel, writing for the sci.astro Galaxies FAQ, claims that there are "about as many as the number of hamburgers sold by McDonald's." Then he elaborates. The usual way to determine the number of stars in the universe is to consider how many stars there are in the Milky Way, and then to multiply that number by our best guesstimate at the number of galaxies in the universe.
This FAQ suggests there are probably about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, although "a 50% error either way is quite plausible." As for the number of galaxies in the universe, well that's a whole separate mathematical puzzle. Other star enumerators we located on the Web offer numbers ranging from more than 200 billion stars in our galaxy to 3 thousand million billion stars (3 followed by 16 zeroes), in the universe. NASA alleges there are zillions of uncountable stars. From
a recent astronomy news article on CNN.com, we learned about the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an ambitious astronomy project currently mapping the night sky, to determine the "positions and absolute brightnesses of more than 100 million celestial objects." So stay tuned, the star count is still out.
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