How many suns in the milky way galaxy

What defines a galaxy? A galaxy is a huge collection of gas, dust, and billions of stars and their solar systems. A galaxy is held together by gravity. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, also has a supermassive black hole in the middle.

Some scientists think there could be as many as one hundred billion galaxies in the universe. How old is the universe? How many Earths are there? On November 4, , astronomers reported, based on Kepler space mission data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars and red dwarf stars within the Milky Way galaxy.

What is beyond the Milky Way? Scientists have long been unable to find exoplanets—planets outside the solar system—beyond the confines of the Milky Way. After all, our galaxy is a warped disc about a hundred thousand light-years across and a thousand light-years thick, so it's incredibly difficult to see beyond that.

What is at the center of our galaxy? The Milky Way has the shape of a spiral and rotates around its center, with long curling arms surrounding a slightly bulging disk. What planets are in the Milky Way? How many suns are there in the whole universe? For many years scientists have studied our own solar system. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.

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Give Give. Astronomers estimate there are about thousand million stars in the Milky Way alone. Outside that, there are millions upon millions of other galaxies also!

It has been said that counting the stars in the Universe is like trying to count the number of sand grains on a beach on Earth. We might do that by measuring the surface area of the beach, and determining the average depth of the sand layer. If we count the number of grains in a small representative volume of sand, by multiplication we can estimate the number of grains on the whole beach.

For the Universe, the galaxies are our small representative volumes, and there are something like 10 11 to 10 12 stars in our Galaxy, and there are perhaps something like 10 11 or 10 12 galaxies. With this simple calculation you get something like 10 22 to 10 24 stars in the Universe.

This is only a rough number, as obviously not all galaxies are the same, just like on a beach the depth of sand will not be the same in different places. No one would try to count stars individually, instead we measure integrated quantities like the number and luminosity of galaxies. ESA's infrared space observatory Herschel has made an important contribution by 'counting' galaxies in the infrared, and measuring their luminosity in this range — something never before attempted.

Knowing how fast stars form can bring more certainty to calculations.