IC 1101

Tell them how large IC 11 is.

IC 1101 galaxy.

Galaxy IC 1101 is absolutely immense, with a diameter estimated to be around 1.7 million light years across.

That makes it more than 15 times wider than the Milky Way.

That's insane.

The problem is, though, that galaxies, much like people, come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes.

You have small dwarf galaxies like GN-Z11, which is actually the oldest galaxy ever photographed, up to monstrous overgrown ones like IC1101, which contains some 100 trillion stars.

So this simple multiplying idea is not going to work out.

So a better way to calculate the total number of stars in the observable universe is actually to go back to that original patch of the sky image.