Do You Know How Many Stars Exist in the Universe?

The night sky is besieged with numerous twinkling lights known as stars. The Earth is a tiny planet that circles these numerous stars in the vast universe. Humans have named a few constellations of stars such as the Orion and the Big Dipper. But in reality, there are more stars in the universe, which still has not been tagged with a name.

One cannot predict how many stars make up the universe; it's a whole lot. A possible way to arrive at the prediction of the number of stars is to figure the average number of stars present in the galaxy and multiply that by the estimated number of galaxies in the universe. According to a report published in LiveScience, the deep-field images extracted from the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that there are 10 times more galaxies present in the universe than scientists previously imagined. Earlier, Christopher Conselice, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham in the UK along with his colleagues published a study in the Journal Science which stated that there are nearly two trillion galaxies in total.

Conselice wrote an e-mail to LiveScience which said that according to one of the best estimates; nearly 100 million stars inhabit the average galaxy. As per a report published in Space.com, "The various types of stars in our galaxy can produce nearly 100 billion stars in the galaxy, some bigger and smaller than our own sun."

It was not an easy task for the scientists to predict the actual number of total stars because only the most luminous stars shine bright enough to be detected in the telescope. According to LiveScience, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (which maps all the observable celestial objects in one-third of the sky), detected nearly 48 million stars. Most of the scientists estimate the number of stars in the universe based on the galactic mass. As the universe is expanding, the light from other galaxies is, on average, slightly red-shifted. Astronomers can make a rough estimate regarding how fast the galaxy can rotate.