There Are More Stars In The Universe Than There Are Grains Of Sand On Earth

When it comes to determining the number of stars in the sky, you first have to establish what you mean by the sky. If you just mean the sky you can view when you look up at night, sand clearly wins. There are 9,096 stars visible from Earth by a human with average eyesight, according to Sky & Telescope. But, that's from both hemispheres. From one hemisphere, a maximum of 4,548 are visible depending on season, weather, and light pollution.

However, if you mean all of the stars in the observable universe, the picture shifts. There are more than 170 billion galaxies filled with stars, according to Universe Today. Our Milky Way galaxy has as many as 400 billion stars. Other galaxies out there have more or less. Some spiral galaxies can have more than one trillion stars, and some elliptical galaxies have 100 trillion. On the other end of the spectrum, some dwarf galaxies have far fewer stars than the Milky Way. If you just multiply the number of galaxies by the number of stars in our galaxy, you get around 1024 stars, or a one and 24 zeros. A 2003 estimate found there were 70 thousand million, million, million stars in the observable universe, or a seven and 23 zeros, according to NPR. In either case, stars outnumber sand grains. 

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