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Ask an Astrophysicist

The Question

(Submitted January 15, 1997)

How many stars are there, named and un-named, known to exist ?

The Answer

This is a very good question! There are too many stars for scientists to actually count one-by-one, so other methods of estimating the total number of stars are used. We believe that there are on the order of 1021 stars in our Universe. If you write that number out, it looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This is a lot of stars!

Sincerely,
Laura Whitlock
for the Ask an Astrophysicist team

Questions on this topic are no longer responded to by the "Ask an Astrophysicist" service. See http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/ask_an_astronomer.html for help on other astronomy Q&A services.

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Last Updated: Thursday, 01-Dec-2005 13:58:37 EST