I went through because I was hoping someone would answer and especially explain it better than I. Basically we can only see object out to a certain distance partially due to the speed of light and also partiall due to resolution. The farther away the harder it is to get detail as the signal degrades do to interaction with things. In addition space expands and is not limited to the speed of light. Much of what we understand is from non light signals like the cosmic microwave background that does not give us images. The long and short is we can see out a distance from ourselves in all directions but the farthest we have seen as far as I can tell from searching is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoM-z14 from the james web. Which is under 300 million years.
There are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy. There are about 200 trillion galaxies in the parts of the universe that are observable from earth. Which is to say, galaxies outnumber the stars in our galaxy by about 20 to 1.
If we limit it to stars we can see with the naked eye, then instead of 100 billion stars, you’re down to something like 5,000 to 10,000 stars depending where on earth you are observing from. In which case galaxies in the observable universe outnumber the stars we can see about 20 billion to 1.
Stop eating galaxies lol
Fun fact, there are more trees on earth than stars in our galaxy.
Not for that if we keep going the way we are.
the earth is more forested now than it was 100 years ago. but don’t let that fact get in the way of your doomer nonsense.
How about 500 years ago, jackass?
It’s almost like 100 years ago there were fewer regulations. Your implication that the world is renewing on its own is hogwash suitable for a toilet.
There were more trees 100 years ago than now.
More 200 years before that etc etc etc
Guy is an idiot
The whole universe? Absolutely. Even the smallwst infinity is larger than any countable sum.
The visible universe, meaning those close enough that a photon could have passed from there to here since the “big bang” faded enough to allow such transmissal? I don’t know offhand.
A simple web search suggest that our galaxy has less than 1011 stars – 400,000,000,000 or so. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way )
Finding our other figure is a bit harder, since trusty Wikipedia doesn’t include a direct figure and the first few articles I could find was from the BBC and used number names instead of scientific notation, which is ambiguous at this scale. ( in the long scale we only have milliardaires, and Elon Musk’s brief paper fortune was a billion rather than trillion.)
Thankfully a NASA articke linked to what appears to be the underlying research paper, and gives us a helpful number of 2x1012. (2,000,000,000,000)
So, if the paper is right then, yes, there are more galaxies in the observable universe than stars in the Milky Way. But, the paper was an indirect measurement that increased the galaxy count by a whole order of magnitude, so there may be only 2x1011 galaxies. Except, of course, that the estimate of stars in the miky way was an estimate and could be as little as 1/4 of the number I cited above…
And if the paper is wrong and the truth of the estimate is in the middle, both of our numbers could be 2x1011, with approximately one star in our galaxy for every galaxy in the observable universe.
Just a small addition if you don’t mind—we don’t know whether the universe is finite or infinite. Intuitively, I prefer a finite universe because I can’t wrap my head around actual infinities.
Locally flat or curved regions are possible in both cases.
To add on to your “with telescope” numbers, the number you can see with the naked eye is surprisingly small. If you are out on a clear night, you can pretty much only see stars within the milky way, and even then you’re talking the ballpark of 5000. If you’re naming them and counting them on all sides of the earth (not just those visible from your one location) you can double that if you have great eyes.
The whole universe? Absolutely. Even the smallwst infinity is larger than any countable sum.
Sorry, I don’t understand. Surely the number of galaxies is not infinite?
For us, it might as well be. Infinity, zero, any other value. We can’t measure what’s outside of the observable universe, by definition, so we can’t confirm any theories with an experiment.
Our models do not specify a shape for the universe, because we have not seen any evidence for a spatial (as opposed to temporal) limit to how big the universe is.
In fact, we infer that since what we can see becomes homogenous on a surprisingly small scale, the whole infinite universe is similarly filled with galactic clusters, and thus there is an (unreachable) infinite number of galaxies.
This quickly gets into the weeds of “can we even say trees fall in the forests of planets no humans will ever observe”, possibly followed by an argument over if infinites are equal or comparable.
The actual size of the universe is actually not measurable. It exceeds the distance that we can observe because off the speed of light.
It might be infinite and we can never know if we measure it using light.
Only a part of the universe is observable. All the stars that can be seen are in this region.
So we cannot answer this question with certainty. But I would lean towards more galaxies than obervable stars because the universe could be very large or infinite in size.
The Hubble Deep Field imaged an area of the sky effectively the size of a tennis ball as seen from 100 meters away. It captured over 3000 objects almost all of which were galaxies. So yes, WAY more galaxies.
A tennis ball at 100 meters? That’d be a single pixel on many cameras at that range, thst doesnt sound right
I remember reading it was about the size of your thumb nail at an arms length
I’m going by what Wikipedia says.
Lots more
Atleast 3
Probably. There are more trees on earth than stars in the Milky Way.
I don’t believe that for second. There’s a lot of fucking stars in the milky way.
And we’ve cut down a hell of a lot of trees.
I was curious, so:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/metrics/how-many-trees-are-in-the-world
3 trillion trees.
vs
100 - 400 billion stars.
https://www.space.com/25959-how-many-stars-are-in-the-milky-way.html
https://astro.arizona.edu/news/how-many-stars-are-milky-way-more-you-can-imagine
Where are they hiding all these trees? I just looked outside and saw, like, 5 tops.
also clonal trees typically, usually count as one. since some are vegatatively reproduced from sharing the same root system.
Well I’m seeing like 5 over here as well, so we’re up to 10.
Unless you’re seeing the same trees
That’s why it’s such a fun fact.
Yes
He’s right you know. The answer is yes.
With the naked eye or with a telescope are two very different questions.
But the answer to either question is “more galaxies in the universe.” Estimate of galaxies in the observable universe is 2 trillion. The Milky Way contains at most 400 billion stars, most of which will not be visible with either the naked eye or a telescope.
No. Galaxies are made of lots of stars, so there are presumably more stars than galaxies.
That was not the question.
Fun fact the closest neighbor galaxy is your mom’s fat ass.
That black hole in the centre will eat anything
I haven’t been to all of them, but from what I hear, yes.
