How many stars are there in space?

Hi, my name is Kim McLeod, and I'm a professor at Wellesley College, which is in Massachusetts, just outside of Boston.

And in my work here at Wellesley, I use a telescope right here to help NASA discover planets around other stars.

But you asked how many stars are in space.

Here's what I can tell you, Kellan.

Some kids like to know how many stars they can see in the sky.

If you live in a city, a big city like Boston or New York, there's a lot of lights from the city, and kids can't see very many stars at all.

They might only be able to see 30 stars or something.

So if you started to count them, one, two, three, it would only take you 30 seconds.

You'd take longer than that to brush your teeth, I bet.

But if you lived in a little bit of a darker place, like where I live, you could see a couple hundred stars.

And if you started to count those, one, two, three, well, that would just take you a few minutes.

But some kids live in the country where it's really, really dark, and those lucky kids can see a few thousand stars.

And if they went out to count the stars, it would take them about a whole hour.

But all the stars that all the kids in the world can see, that's just a small fraction of all the stars in our galaxy.

We live in a galaxy called the Milky Way, and our Milky Way galaxy has about 100 billion stars.

Now, that's so many that if you started to count them, one, two, three, you'd be counting for 3,000 years, and you wouldn't even be able to stop to sleep or eat.

We can't see all of those stars with our eye from here.

They're too far away.

But we do have telescopes in space that are looking at those stars and counting them in the Milky Way galaxy, and it's about 100 billion.

Now, that's a pretty big number, but I'm not done yet because there are about 100 billion galaxies like our Milky Way in the universe.

And so if you added together all the stars in all the galaxies in our visible universe, you'd get such a big number that it's 100 billion, hundred billion.

And if you wanted to try to write a number that big, you'd have to write a one with 22 zeros after it.

You can try that sometime.

But it's gonna be such a big number of stars, it's really gonna be hard for us to picture that.

But there are other things that we have lots of in this world.