Does anyone know if there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand in the sea?

Answer 1

mathematicians at the University of Hawaii tried to guess how many grains of sand are on the world's beaches. They came up with 7,500,000,000,000,000,000, or seven quintillion five quadrillion grains of sand.

a team of stargazers based at the Australian National University tried to calculated the total number of stars in the known universe, according to a study by Australian astronomers They came up with 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 70 sextillion stars.


in other words about 10 times as many stars as grains of sand on all the world's beaches and deserts.


before you ask how many atoms in the universe i will tell you . the estimated numbers ranges from 4^78 up to 10^81. i don't think my zero key could take that many punches

Answer 2

A typical sand grain is 1mm in size. A cubic metre of sand therefore contains about a billion sand grains (using the american billion, a thousand million).

The surface area of the earth is 4/3 times pi times the cube of the world's radius, and about 80% is ocean. The area of ocean comes out to about 10^17 square metres. Not all of this is covered by sand, of course.

Let's suppose that 0.01% of the ocean floor is covered with sand, and the sand deposits are say 100 m deep. Then the total volume of sand in the world is about 10^17 x 0.01% x 100 = 10^15 cubic metres. This is a million billion cubic metres.

So the world contains about a billion times a million billion sand grains, ie about 10^24 sand grains, alternatively put, a thousand billion billion sand grains.

Does anyone know how many stars there are?

Answer 3

Well I'm no astronomer, but I would say there were more garins of sand in the sea...

as for the majority of stars have planets and I'm assuming there are lots of grains of sand in numerous seas on many different planets. Otherwise if not including other planets any answer would be a hypothesis.

but at least the grains of sand in the sea on Earth is a finite number, however we do not know the extent of the Universe and whether there are others....

Answer 4

Yes,there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand in the sea because the sky is infinite not like the sea which is just a lot of water on the surface of the earth.

hope this helps.

Answer 5

Carl Sagan claimed that. According to his calculations, there are about 1 x 10^22 stars in the universe.
One could calculate how much sand this many sand grains might be in cubic km and then figure how close that might be to the amount of sand on all the beaches.

Answer 6

If you include the grains of sand in the seas in the planets around the stars, the sand may win.

Answer 7

I am glad you asked this one because I have been out counting them. If you think about it, in one place you are dealing with a finite number. In the other place, an infinite, so I would definitely aim you toward the heavens if you want the greater quantity. All you need to do is to go to your search bar and call up the Hubble Telescope stuff online to notice that the sky's the limit. This is a fascinating question, but remember the Universe is expanding outwardly forever. That sort of gives it priority.

Answer 8

I'm sorry but I feel the need to be pointlessly anal. There are no stars in the 'sky', because the sky is classed only up to the point of no gravity, the rest is 'space'. As for sand in the sea, is that just in the sea, on the beaches and the sea, just on beaches or in the whole world, but anyway, the correct answer is 'sand in the sea', as the star things answer is zero.

Answer 9

well with the average pound of sand having approx 1 1/2 million grains I would think that ther is more sand than stars

Answer 10

A wonderful query indeed. It is a statement which I used to tell to my students in order to stimulate thier curiosity because the idea is very pregnant with possibilities of creative imagination. At one stage a young student challenged the truth of this expression and I had this to say " Imagine a landscape full of stones and rocks which could be reasonably be estimated. Take one them and have them ground to granules. The number of granules so ground out, will always be immensely greater than the possible number of rocks just counted". There was an applause in the classroom much to the consternation of the next class. Many thanks for the question.