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Space Science

70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Stars Out There 195

Posted by michael from the fermi's-paradox dept.
ChopsMIDI writes "Ever wanted to wish upon a star? Well, you have 70,000 million million million to choose from. That's the total number of stars in the known universe, according to a study by Australian astronomers. It's also about 10 times as many stars as grains of sand on all the world's beaches and deserts."
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70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Stars Out There More

70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Stars Out There

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  • and all the media seems interested in (Score:5, Funny)

    by Enrico Pulatzo ( 536675 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2003 @08:40PM (#6507321)
    are J-Lo and Ben Affleck...bummer

  • seti@homing it up (Score:3, Funny)

    by sirmikester ( 634831 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2003 @08:42PM (#6507343) Homepage Journal
    [quote]Asked if he believed the huge scale of the universe meant there was intelligent life out there somewhere, he told the paper.

    "Seventy thousand million million million is a big number ... it's inevitable."[/quote]

    Good thing i'm keeping my seti@home [berkeley.edu] client running all the time... we're bound to find something sometime!

    • Re:seti@homing it up (Score:5, Informative)

      by ThorGod ( 456163 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2003 @08:53PM (#6507422) Journal
      Ahh yes, but the space-time window in which we're viewing is very, very, very, very, very, very (get the picture?) recent and equally narrow.

      If you're into this subject, I suggest reading "Hyperspace" by Michio Kaku. Good book, and he's got at least a chapter on the statistical analysis of the existance of life in the Universe. Very good book all around :)

      • Re:seti@homing it up (Score:5, Interesting)

        by i_am_nitrogen ( 524475 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2003 @09:00PM (#6507467) Homepage Journal
        I bought Hyperspace used and it is indeed a very thought provoking reading. There are probably some newer theories that aren't discussed in the book, but it's still pretty decent popular science. One thing I didn't like about it is in some parts the author seems to try to aggressively imply that there is proof that God doesn't exist, when of course, such proof is currently impossible to obtain using current methods and technology, as is proof that God does exist.

        It's quite similar to what SCO is trying to do. Some scientists and others apparently believed that if they say it loud enough long enough, eventually it will be accepted as truth. Guess what: in large part, it worked. In reality, there cannot be a proof for everyone that God does or does not exist. The only way to find out is to look for yourself.

      • ThorGod makes a great point, in a sense we've only been transmitting radio signals for about 100 years. So, these signals are reaching a few other solar systems near by. I would also recommend Michio Kaku's book, and if you ever see him on TechTV he gives great interviews even though his site lacks somewhat IMO.
    • Actually, I stopped running seti@home when I checked into their science. Now, before anyone gets defensive it's not the actual method they're using I have problems with. It's the scope. In principle it's a good idea. If it ever found anything, I'd be among the first to applaud them.

      However, if one looks closely you'll see that they're only capable of seeing a signal from stars within say, 70-150 light years (I don't remember the exact numbers; but, this is a reasonable assumption). If you look at th

  • IPv8? (Score:5, Funny)

    by m0rph3us0 ( 549631 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2003 @08:49PM (#6507388)
    Does this mean within the next few eons we may have to transition to a 256 bit IP space or will IPv6 be enough?
    • one of the comparisons I've heard about IPv6 is "An IP address for every grain of sand"

      methinks that a 256 bit address space may still not be enough should an inter-galactic internet become mainstream. then again, latency times in terms of hundreds of years may be a big turnoff for some web surfers.

      • Re:IPv8? (Score:3, Funny)

        by Danse ( 1026 )

        then again, latency times in terms of hundreds of years may be a big turnoff for some web surfers.

        Yeah, playing Quake MDXXV will be a bitch with that kinda lag.

      • They can just use NAT, and not have to waste a whole bunch of routable IP's.
        • setup a big ring around the planet.. its one huge global NAT router.

          Thing is... would a DDoS attack from the whole universe cause a black hole?

          HOw much does a packet weigh?:)
        • Uggg, just showing there may never be a permanent respite from that horrible concept.
      • No, this won't be an issue thanks to Hyperspace Subnetting.
    • There can actually be an IPv7 - there was also an IPv5 which never got out of the closed rooms and theoritical discussions and papers. There is no reason for naming that suffix in multiples of 2.

    • Re:IPv8? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Captain Nitpick ( 16515 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2003 @11:39PM (#6508513)
      Does this mean within the next few eons we may have to transition to a 256 bit IP space or will IPv6 be enough?

      In the long-standing tradition of dorks, I'm going to take your joke question seriously and answer it.

      If I'm counting zeroes correctly, we've got 7e22 stars to deal with. Base 2 log of 7e22 is 75.8898. Since having fractional bits isn't really feasible, that gets rounded up to 76.

      IPv6 uses 128 bit addresses, so subtracting off the 76 bits for specifying the star leaves us with 52 bits to play with. 2^52 gives us 4.5e15 addresses, which is roughly a million times more addresses than IPv4's 32 bits allow.

      In short, IPv6 does have a big enough address space to cover the visible universe, as long as you're not trying to assign individual IP addresses to trillions of nanobots.

      • 2^52 gives us 4.5e15 addresses, which is roughly a million times more addresses than IPv4's 32 bits allow.

        What, do you think that while we're colonizing every star in the Universe we're going to stop at just one colony planet per star?

        Take a look at our own solar system, for example. At the Earth's orbit, the Sun puts out radiant energy over 2.8e17 square kilometers of space, at a density of about a kilowatt per square meter, of which at least 200 watts could be converted into useful work. So, that's a

  • I've figured out the population of the world. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bons ( 119581 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2003 @08:50PM (#6507393) Homepage Journal
    By calculating the population of my neighborhood and assuming that my neighborhood has average distribution...

    From the article:
    That number was then multiplied by the number of similar sized strips needed to cover the entire sky, Driver said, and then multiplied again out to the edge of the visible universe.

    I wonder if this sort of "science" is how hardware manufacturers get their numbers?

    • Re:I've figured out the population of the world. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The method is actually fairly accurate - the distribution of galaxies and their density is sufficiently uniform to provide a number that shouldn't be off by more than 7-8%.

      A similar approach was used long ago to (quite successfully) estimate the number of galaxies in the universe before we had the technology to measure signals from the farthest ones directly (which was done at first when we had gamma-class radio telescopes).

      It's really more clever than it sounds. You just have to take a few mathematical p

    • Re:I've figured out the population of the world. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bootsy Collins ( 549938 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2003 @10:08PM (#6507957)

      By calculating the population of my neighborhood and assuming that my neighborhood has average distribution...

      From the article:
      > That number was then multiplied by the number of similar sized strips
      > needed to cover the entire sky, Driver said, and then multiplied again
      > out to the edge of the visible universe.

      I wonder if this sort of "science" is how hardware manufacturers get their numbers?

      Be careful. Do you have a reason to believe that your neighborhood is typical? Do you have data indicating such?

      The astronomers in question didn't use such an approach because they're idiots; they used such an approach because we already have a heck of a lot of data about the galaxy distribution. The RMS (fractional) fluctuation in galaxy number count in a random volume the size of the one they surveyed is expected to be tiny; and it's expected to be tiny because of surveys we've already done which indicate such a convergence towards homogeneity as scale increases.

      • This thread reminds me of an old quote:

        "Tell someone there are 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the sky and they will believe you but, hang a sign on a park bench which reads 'wet paint' and people will touch the bench to find out.'

        We aren't even sure what gravity is or whether or not the concept of space/time and gravity is homgeneous throughout the universe and yet we are ready to number the stars. Arrogant little beings aren't we :)

        Maybe someone will compute the dimensions of the Univers
    • I find it interesting that they determined an estimate of the total mass of all the matter in the Universe before they figured out how many stars there are. You'd think they'd come up with the number of stars first, and then base the mass estimate on that.

      They also said that the number may actually be too small, given that light from some parts of the Universe hasn't had time to reach us yet. So it may be impossible to determine the total size of the Universe.

      One question I've always had is: when we look

      • Re:Total mass (Score:2, Informative)

        by schmink182 ( 540768 )
        IANAPhysicist, but I'm pretty sure I can answer some of your questions. It has been theorized that the speed of light has changed in the past, and therefore can continue to change. However, if light used to be slower, then matter could still not travel faster than the slower speed, following all the current known laws. As far as I can tell, if the universe's expansion were to accelerate past the speed of light, then the force of gravity would be unable to slow it back down. Sadly, with regards to the initi
        • You can't compare the Hubble constant (the speed of expansion) to the speed of light.

          The universe expands by growing empty space everywhere, not just at its edges. This is why you measure the Hubble constant as speed per distance, (ie. kilometers per second per Megaparsec). If you want to compare c (speed of light) to H0 (Hubble constant) you'll have to agree on over which distance you're going to compare them. If you make the distance (the Megaparsecs) big enough; H0 will always win.


          • The one thing I would add to your post . . .

            The universe expands by growing empty space everywhere, not just at its edges. This is why you measure the Hubble constant as speed per distance, (ie. kilometers per second per Megaparsec).

            . . .is that I would change your description of the Hubble parameter to apparent recession velocity per distance. This is a subtle but important change, because it addresses one of the most common misconceptions about the expansion of the Universe -- namely, that we thin


        • IANAPhysicist, but I'm pretty sure I can answer some of your questions. It has been theorized that the speed of light has changed in the past, and therefore can continue to change. However, if light used to be slower, then matter could still not travel faster than the slower speed, following all the current known laws.

          And it doesn't really matter anyway, since we have no good evidence at present that the speed of light has changed significantly over the history of the Universe, and (especially) since

      • They also said that the number may actually be too small, given that light from some parts of the Universe hasn't had time to reach us yet. So it may be impossible to determine the total size of the Universe.

        The total size of the universe may even be infinite. At any given time, we can only see the parts close enough for light emitted in the past to reach us, but to the best of my knowledge there is no restriction on the dimensions of the universe as a whole (perhaps an astrophysicist can enlighten me if

        • > They also said that the number may actually be too small, given that light
          > from some parts of the Universe hasn't had time to reach us yet. So it may
          > be impossible to determine the total size of the Universe.

          The total size of the universe may even be infinite. At any given time, we can only see the parts close enough for light emitted in the past to reach us, but to the best of my knowledge there is no restriction on the dimensions of the universe as a whole (perhaps an astrophysicist c

          • You do understand correctly (yay!).

            The only thing that I'm having trouble with is the microwave background radiation. Light and matter decoupled when the universe was extremely compact - the parts emitting the background radiation we see would have been very close indeed to our location. Space must have been growing fast enough for points this close to still be moving apart at or very close to the speed of light.

            Inflation stopped long before this, so it doesn't help.

            On reflection, the relation you provi

            • The only thing that I'm having trouble with is the microwave background radiation. Light and matter decoupled when the universe was extremely compact - the parts emitting the background radiation we see would have been very close indeed to our location. Space must have been growing fast enough for points this close to still be moving apart at or very close to the speed of light.

              Well, not as compact as you might think. The surface of last scattering, and matter-radiation decoupling, are at a redshift o

      • Re:Total mass (Score:5, Informative)

        by Mattcelt ( 454751 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @01:48AM (#6509088)
        IANAP, at least not professionally, though I think I may be able to shed some light (or at least a few photons) on your questions.

        I find it interesting that they determined an estimate of the total mass of all the matter in the Universe before they figured out how many stars there are. You'd think they'd come up with the number of stars first, and then base the mass estimate on that.
        You are right in thinking that intuitively, this would be the way to work it. (I know that it would be if I were approaching it, but then these guys are probably smarter than me.) The interesting thing is that as part of the work Einstein did, there was a mathematical shortcut which allows us to calculate the total mass of the objects in the universe based on their collective gravitational effects.

        It works like this:
        1) The universe has a certain amount of objects, each of which have mass.
        2) We know that any object that has mass will have a gravitational effect on all others (in the amount of the inverse of the square of the distance between them).
        3) We can calculate with reasonable certainty (with infinite sequences - similar to the Fibonacci spiral, etc.) what the total effect of all the gravity would be in the universe based on any arbitrary amount of mass that exists in the universe.
        4) We can tell how much of an effect the total gravitational force is by measuring the effects of gravity on galaxies, namely how fast the galaxies are moving, whether they are moving away from or towards one another (on a large scale), and whether the galaxies farther out are moving more slowly or faster than the ones close by.
        5) We know what effect (through the math again) a certain amount of mass (x) would have on the universe as a whole. To be more specific, we know that if the equation with (x) works out to be greater than 1 (i.e., f(x)>1, which was sort of arbitrarily chosen, but bear with me here), the universe will eventually pull itself back together and gravity will cause it to end in a big crunch the opposite of the big bang. If (x) makes the equation *exactly* 1, (i.e., f(x)=1), the universe will reach a point of equilibrium and remain stable for eternity. If the value of (x) makes f(x)Interestingly enough, physicists cannot seem to figure out where more than 10% of the matter they think *should* exists is! Based on the empirical evidence, they know that the value should be something like f(x)=.99999999999999999 or something very close to, but ultimately smaller than, 1. In order to make this equation work, they know they need a certain value for (x). But they can't seem to figure out what more than 10% of (x) is - galaxies, stars, black holes, etc. can only account for a small amount of the overall mass needed to make the universe behave how it does (there is a technical reason for this conclusion, but I don't understand it well enough to explain it here).

        The other 90% is something physicists call "dark matter", because they haven't been able to see it yet. They're not even sure it exists - the formula may need to be refined somewhat. Einstein discovered this anomaly when he first devised this theory and the math behind it. So he added a "fudge factor" to his equation which helped it all come out in the end. He gave it a spiffy name to make it sound legit - it's called the Cosmological Constant. Before he died, he called the creation of the CC his biggest mistake, but physicists have been absolutely unable to shake it yet, because they still don't know why there's such a big discrepancy between the matter they know about and the matter they need to make the equation perfect. It's one of the great mysteries of physics still.

        As for your second question, "if that light has been traveling that whole time toward us, how did we get here first?", think about this: if you are travelling away from someone at the speed of light, and there is one light second between you when you emit a photon, it will take one second for that photon to reach the other perso

        • Light moves differently than that... it's the same speed no matter where/when/speed of the observer(s). it's really messed up, and even i didn't understand it well in Physics3
          • Light moves differently than that... it's the same speed no matter where/when/speed of the observer(s). it's really messed up, and even i didn't understand it well in Physics3

            You are correct for the most part. However, there have been recent proposals and studies that there may have been a time in the early universe where the speed of light, c, which was still a constant, had a value different from ~3x10^8 where it is now. (I.e., "the speed of light" was not the same as it is now)

            Mattcelt

  • I don't believe it... (Score:5, Funny)

    by RALE007 ( 445837 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2003 @08:51PM (#6507405)
    ...and intend to disprove this claim.

    1, 2, 3, 4, 5...

  • Couldn't it be said as... (Score:3, Informative)

    by TheWanderingHermit ( 513872 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2003 @09:15PM (#6507561)
    70 sextillion? Or did I miscount 000's?

    • Yes (Score:3, Funny)

      by Alethes ( 533985 )
      According to the article that you didn't read, which has a title of "Star survey reaches 70 sextillion," you could use the term "70 sextillion."
      • Wow, so there must be more IPv6 addresses out there than stars because ... ...IPv6 address space is : "so big that there's not a word for the number,"
      • To be honest, I didn't read the article. I figured, "Okay, they say there's x stars in the Universe. So what else are they going to say? Who counted, what part of the sky they sampled (I seriously doubt they counted the entire night sky and each of 70 sextillion stars) and they'll probably try to find a way to bring the figure home."

        Seriously, so why read an article when the story is basically all revealed in the headline? Especially when the link is to CNN -- the "news" network that claims to be so im
    • Wouldn't it be great if it were really 69 Sextillion instead of 70?

  • My property! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Drakker ( 89038 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2003 @09:19PM (#6507589) Homepage Journal
    Star number 65 000 561 002 023 162 and all its surrounding planets, planetoids, asteroids, natural and artificial satellites, gas clouds, neutrinos and dark matter is officialy my sole property according to copyright law #1361. If you dare come into the 235 934 347 238 484 km radius of this solar system, I will sue you to death according to the super duper interstellar DMCA.

    You have been warned, I saw it first!
  • 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

    or

    70,000 million million million

    Whats wrong with just saying 70 sextillion? Whats this million million million shit, and why 70,000 of them? May as well say 70 thousand million million million then, but it sstill stupid. 70 sextillion is shorter, and easier to say.

    D.
    • The fundementalist right has banned the use of sex as a prefix for counting. On top of that, how many people in the US know that sextillion is a valid number?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: bigger ones ambiguous (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Over a million (i.e., billion, trillion ... )
      those number-words are ambiguous; British and I
      think other Euro usage starts going up by multiples
      of 10 ^ 6 instead of Americano 10 ^ 3. I say 7e22.
    • Don't be so smug, I bet less than 1 in 100 people knows what the hell a "sextillion" is. But most of them know what a million is, or least have some vague idea.

      Personally, I think "60 sextillion" is the worst possible way to express this number. It is neither as short as "7e22" nor is it intuitive. "7e22" is so much easier and quicker, and it expresses the order of magnitude without having to memorize some arcane section of the dictionary under "really big fucking numbers."

      ObSagan:

      Or we could just leav

  • Just amazing (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Blenderkitty ( 622104 )
    It's also about 10 times as many stars as grains of sand on all the world's beaches and deserts.

    Everyone you know, everything you've touched, all of human history, on one of 70,000,000,000,000etc stars...

    The universe is so amazing...there's just so much stuff to see out there...I hate being chained to JUST ONE PLANET!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Just like what the early explorers of the 1400 were thinking. There's so much stuff to see, and yet we cant visit all those places with our galleons.

      Today, there's so much stuff to see, and yet our shuttle can't even take us to mars.

  • sex..! (Score:2, Funny)

    by atari2600 ( 545988 )
    sext...damn another metric cousin...call me back when instr(postonSlashdot,3) returns SEX
    *goes back to room*
    SHIT ITS 2003!!
  • Forget this million million million crap... It's 70 sexillion
  • And here I am, stuck on earth without a single vessel capable of interstellar travel.

    Pretty depressing
  • I never knew that Australia had astronomers!

  • Some other numbers for comparison (Score:4, Interesting)

    by notyou2 ( 202944 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2003 @10:43PM (#6508178) Homepage
    30-60 sextillion: The combined number of cells in every living human being on the planet.

    51 sextillion: The number of grains of sand it would take to cover the entire planet once.

    -- CALCULATED FROM --
    There are 6 billion people on the planet. Web searches yielded varying figures of approximately 50-100 trillion cells per human being. The "average" grain of sand is 100 microns across (and I grossly approximated a sand grain as being square).

  • Approaching Avogadro's number (Score:5, Interesting)

    by notyou2 ( 202944 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2003 @10:47PM (#6508199) Homepage
    That's almost spooky... Avogadro's number is approximately 600 sextillion.

    What if it turns out that, after taking into account all the dark matter, the universe contains Avogadro's number of "large objects"? (stars, planets, whatever)

    Could the universe turn out to be nothing more than one mole of stars? :)
    • It would be an interesting, and random conincidence. One mole, is the number of carbon 12 atoms needed to make exaclty 12 grams of carbon 12. (Something in there is defined by that relation, I'm not sure if it's the mole exactly.) Seeing as the gram is an entirely arbitrary unit of mass, this number is entirely arbitrary. I know, I know, that's the boring answer.

      If the universe contains an Avogadro's number of stars then the universe has exactly 1 Ug (universe gram) of mass. Where the universe atomic mass

      • this number is entirely arbitrary.

        It's not entirely arbitrary. One mole is a visible, manageable amount of matter. It could have been one gram or one kilogram of carbon, but it was going to be somewhere around those orders of magnitude. And the fact that there seem to be, within a few orders of magnitude, as many stars in the universe as there are atoms in, say, a pound of ice cream or a human being is kind of interesting.
  • I actually calculated this one night a few months ago whenever I was really boarded. I'm not sure where exactly I got the #s from, but they were from NASA and a few other sources I got off of Google searching for things like "Estimated number galaxies". I came up with ~60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, which I have since dubbed 60 Hexillion. I have no idea what the real name is, but that seems logical based on the billion, trillion progression. My numbers took the approx. numbers of stars in the Milky Way, 20
  • By my calculations, 7 x 10^22 is the number of molecules in approximately 7 grams of sand. There is certainly "plenty of room at the bottom"...
  • with that many stars, how could anyone be so arrogant to think earth has the only intelligent life forms?
    • well, if the odds of carbon forming, grouping into neat proto-protiens and then making some early form of DNA is around 1 in 35 thousand million million and if only one in a million stars has planets that have even remotely life-sustaining (as we know it) properties then odds are we are the only ones in this mess. Those numbers are purely made-up, I'm just saying, you know, I'd like there to be life out there, but I'm not sure that the overwhelming number of stars really makes it more or less likely. It d

  • Finally! :) (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @06:50AM (#6510024)
    Now I can break all these romantic star-watching nights:

    She: I wonder how many stars are out there *dreams*
    I: 70 sextillion b1tch, OWN3D *walks away*

  • Huh. What are the odds... (Score:4, Funny)

    by jpsst34 ( 582349 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @06:55AM (#6510044) Journal
    ...that it would have turned out to be such an even, round number?

    70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Stars Out There

    I mean, I would have thought it to be something more like 70,432,268,111,955,196,651,769 Stars Out There
  • That's a lot!

  • From headline:

    '70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Stars Out There'

    That's just a rough estimate, right?

    [bada-bing.]

  • Just means more names... (Score:3, Funny)

    by jbarr ( 2233 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @10:10AM (#6511495) Homepage
    ...for the International Star Registry [starregistry.com] to sell!
  • An interesting fact would be their calculated error... how many million million millions could they (theoretically) be off? How much would that change things... and why?

    I guess it's like when you have a couple trillion dollars... crashing your personal 747 carrying a couple SBS HC36ms (of course you have about 10 of them... I mean, your friends want to play MOHAA too) into a field of your own ferrari's while your wife divorces you and takes half your money really doesn't matter much.... you're still a rich

  • 70 Quintillion (Score:3, Informative)

    by mrmeval ( 662166 ) <jcmeval@@@yahoo...com> on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @10:42PM (#6518361) Journal
    That's Quintillion I say.

    Million
    Billion
    Trillion
    Quadrillion
    Qunitil lion
    Septillion
    Sextillion (boys and girls like this one)
    Octillion
    Nonillion

  • Taking in the distances etc involved you have to wondered how may of these stars still exist as we are just seeing the echos. Then again how many have been created?

    Rus
  • According to my records that's 70 sextillion. Now if I could get a 70 sextillionbyte hard drive and I'm good to go =)
  • I seem to always end up with that many grains of sand in my car after a trip to the beach!
  • porn sites on the internet.

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