How many stars are in the visible universe?

Question

What are astronomer's best estimates of the total number of stars in the visible universe (about 10-12 billion light years in all directions)?
How many galaxies are there? What is the average number of stars per galaxy?

Answer 1

A rough estimate of the average number of stars in a galaxy is about 100 billion. Then they very roughly estimate something like 100 billion galaxies. So the total would be 10^11 x 10^11, which is 10^22.

Give or take a few quadrillion.

Sorry, but I have to jump back in. The number of stars estimated here would be approximately the number of grains of sand in a section of the Sahara desert, 100 miles wide, 200 miles long, and ten feet deep. Assuming a million grains of sand in a cubic inch. You can check my math. Nothing *like* more than the number of grains of sand on the whole planet...unless our estimate of the number of stars is off by a factor of about 1000. It could be. Actually it could be a lot more than that, but not by current estimates.

The two people below me have a point, but we are just obsessed with counting and making estimates.

Answer 2

There is 15 billion light years of observable universe in every direction, and billions of galaxies all containing billions of stars. The best estimate they came up with was with the phrase: "There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on the planet." So... a lot.

Answer 3

there is concept to be someplace between 3 and seven × 1022 or 30 to 70 sextillion stars in the observable or seen universe which handle themselves into better than 80 billion galaxies, which in turn variety clusters and superclusters.

Answer 4

There are WAY too many to even try and count.

Answer 5

there are to many to count????people might think they know how many there are but really they dont

Answer 6

alot