![]() All together, that comes out to the typically quoted range of between 10 22 and 10 24 total stars, which means that for every grain of sand on every beach on Earth, there are 10,000 stars out there. When confronted with the topic of stars and galaxies, a question that tantalizes most humans is, “Is there other intelligent life out there?” Let’s put some numbers to it-Īs many stars as there are in our galaxy (100 – 400 billion), there are roughly an equal number of galaxies in the observable universe-so for every star in the colossal Milky Way, there’s a whole galaxy out there. On the very best nights, we can see up to about 2,500 stars (roughly one hundred-millionth of the stars in our galaxy), and almost all of them are less than 1,000 light years away from us (or 1% of the diameter of the Milky Way). ![]() Physicist Enrico Fermi felt something too-”Where is everybody?”Ī really starry sky seems vast-but all we’re looking at is our very local neighborhood. Personally, I go for the old “existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour.” But everyone feels something. Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. ![]() (Or see a preview.)Įveryone feels something when they’re in a really good starry place on a really good starry night and they look up and see this: PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. ![]()
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