How many stars are in the Universe?
"There are more stars in the Universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world."
You may well have heard that quoted, but is it remotely accurate?
Personally I've always wondered...
who counted all the beaches?
where does each beach start and stop along the coastline?
was it assumed the tide was in or out?
how deep is the sand on each and every beach?
Maybe somebody did some serious research but it sounds like a lot of guesswork to me.
However, the point is that the answer to the question "How many stars are in the Universe?" is... well, a very big number!
Our galaxy, 'The Milky Way', contains at the very least 200,000,000,000 (two hundred billion) stars and indeed some Astronomers suggest it may contain up to five times more than that (a trillion).
BUT: The Milky Way is nothing special and is in fact distinctly average in size.
Thanks to ever more powerful telescopes the estimated number of galaxies out there has increased substantially over the last few years from at least 100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion) not so long ago to probably around 2,000,000,000,000 (two trillion) today.
So if we assume ours is just an average galaxy containing our lower estimate of a mere two hundred billion stars, then the Universe may contain in the region of two hundred billion x two trillion stars which looks like this as a number: