It's All Stars!

On an average clear night you can see a few thousand stars. Every one of them belongs to our galaxy, the Milky Way---which by the way, was thought as late as the 1950’s to be the entire universe.

The Milky Way Galaxy has more than a few thousand stars in it. It is estimated to contain approximately 100-200 billion stars. The one’s we see with our naked eye happen to be close enough or bright enough to be seen. Even a modest pair of binoculars will show you thousands more.

So, how many stars do you think you could see if you could see them all?

Well, the astronomers tell us that they estimate there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe each with at least 100 billion stars. That’s 100 billion times 100 billion which equals—a lot.

This sort of begs the question--- if there are so many stars—are we alone?