is it true there's more stars in the sky than grains of sand here on earth?

Question

i cant remember where i heard this but would be intresting to find out!

Answer 1

It has been estimated there are more then 7,500,000,000,000,000,000, (7.5 x 10^18) or seven quintillion five quadrillion grains of sand.

It has been estimated that there are 400 billion (4.0 x 10^11) stars in our galaxy alone.

Estimates of the number of galaxies in the universe fall around 100 billion (1.0 X 10^11).


So,
stars in visible universe = 400 billion stars/galaxy * 100 billion galaxies
= 40 000 billion stars in universe (4.0 x 10^22)

"If we round the number of sand grains to, say, 10^20 and round the number of stars to, say 10^22 then there are at least 100 stars in the universe for every grain of sand on earth."

So yes, it's quite plausible that there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on earth.

Answer 2

I believe that would be an educated guess that there are more stars than sand grains. Lets think about that. The earth has a limited area and volume. Let's say that the entire earth was composed of sand. We know that is much more sand than what is actually there. We can average the amount of sand per unit volume to get an approximate value for sand.

According to CNN, there are 70 sextillion stars or 70 times ten to the twenty-first power accounted for so far, but by only what we can see from earth. However, just because we don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If something is far enough away, the light that comes from the object has time to change. Light that has a certain frequency would stretch out far enough not to be light anymore but would be infrared, or more would be microwave and radio waves. When you turn on the television or listen to the radio not on a certain channel, the noise that you hear is from all this interference coming from every direction in space.

So although we could get a round number for sand, it is impossible to count the stars, for we cannot see them all. That is why I believe it is an educated guess (A guess is all, not proven fact) that there are more stars than grains of sand.

To be honest, I do not want to calculate the number of grains of sand, for the numbers are just staggering!

Answer 3

Here is the answer I gave a gew months back to almost the same quesion.

Stipulating an infinite universe (which I do not), and the fact the you limited then number of grains of sand in Earth (do we discount the ones on the surface?) I would have to say that the number of grains of sand are finite and the number of stars are infinite.

That is stipulating infinity.

Now let’s go to a more accepted view of the universe.

Back a few years ago, well, maybe more then just a few, the universe consisted of just a point (much smaller than a grain of sand) surrounded by a vast nothing, no space, no matter, no time, which I will call Eternity (no time, infinite time, with no point of reference what difference does it make?).

For some reason (if you want, you can say some omnipotent entity said “Let there be light” in Hebrew) this point began to expand violently releasing huge amounts of mass, matter, and energy. Here the universe and time began. This event is called the big bang (ironically, it had to have been silent).

This is when things got interesting.

Soon (considering the age of the universe, it was soon) matter began to condense into gasses and Newton said “Let there be gravity” and the gasses began to attract to each other and become more and more massive collections of gasses. These collections eventually became galaxies and stars. How many? No one knows, but we do know that the universe is, still, constantly expanding and the number of stars, while not infinite, is very, very large.

Eventually, a cloud of gas condensed into a star that we call Sol. While most of the gas went into the star, some of it remained in a disc around the star and began to condense into planets. It is the third planet that we are interested in.

This planet was in a unique location. Because of it’s distance from Sol, water could exist in all three states, solid, liquid and gas. Also, because of a giant (comparatively) moon, most of it’s atmosphere was stripped off, preventing the greenhouse effect that Venus has.

However a substansual atmosphere did remain!

Now we have a planet with water and an atmosphere. A perfect place for erosion. This erosion, caused the rocks on the surface of the planet to break down into smaller and smaller pieces, eventually leading to sand.

The actions that created sand was not finished with it yet however.

The sand continued to be broken down into silt and this silt works it’s way down to the sea where the weight of the water and newer silt that covered it eventually compressed it into rock.

A vicious cycle!

However, this cycle will not allow much sand to exist in the earth. Pressure will cause it to compress back into the rock that it came from.

So, the answer to your question is: Stars.

Answer 4

No. not if the stars turn out to be our own sun and all we are looking at is the illusion of light orbiting our galaxy. light has a very small mass but it will bend in a gravitational field, our galaxy has a massive gravitational field that covers a vast area, over that area light will bend; even perhaps back to the point of origin. It will continue to bend until it is blocked by an object. if this is true then our whole concept of the size of the galaxy is out of order. the galaxy might even be much smaller than we have come to know.

Answer 5

according to astronomer's there at least 100 billion Galaxy's and each of those may contain 100 million stars there fore you can see where the phrase came from as for my personal belief i do believe the are more stars in the heavens than sand on all the beaches and deserts on earth

Answer 6

Yes by a large factor. We live in a galaxy known as the milky way. If you imagine our sun as one grain of sugar the milky way would represent a 1 Kg bag of sugar.

Now imaging that the milky way is now a grain of sugar the observed universe could be represented as a 1 kg bag of sugar wth each grain represented as a galaxy

Answer 7

It is more than true, if you can imagine the infinite space of the universe packed with stars and a small planet (Earth) full of sand there are probably more than 100,000,000 times more stars than sand, no its probably even more than that.

Answer 8

No, there are 5 more grains of sand on earth than stars.

No, wait, 6 grains of sand just melted in a volcano, so there are more stars...

No, wait 10 stars just went super-nova, so there are more grains of sand...

No, wait... Oh, I give up.

Answer 9

Who knows. At the moment its very cloudy outside my house and I can't count any but I can see hundreds of grains of sand outside our shed , so I would have to go for the sand.

Answer 10

I have heard that said before too but they are both pretty much uncountable so its really impossible to say which there are more of. I think its just a way of expressing the fact that there a millions and millions of stars out there, and much more than we can actually see. But it would be interesting to know.