Yea I know, I have way too much free time on my hands and so I go off on these little tangents collecting what I can find, here is one of those little things that never ceases to amaze me
I think a lot of us have heard the estimate that here are more stars than grains of sand on the earth..
SO ... I started to research this number a bit, my gut feeling was right, that number is completely off base according to astronomers in Australia, Europe and the US....
And now for the real story.......
The real number is 10X's higher.... bout fell out of my chair.... (on a side bar, the number of "earth" like planets in just the milky way (just 1 galaxy, ours) is estimated to be 60 billion...
(reference image below)
This is a deep field shot from the Hubble.. it took something like 10 days to record and if viewed from earth, the area is roughly the area of a head of a pin at arms length... (Boy I love this stuff!)
Note that these are not stars, they are complete Galaxies...
Download the unmodified 3000X2400 image
I think a lot of us have heard the estimate that here are more stars than grains of sand on the earth..
SO ... I started to research this number a bit, my gut feeling was right, that number is completely off base according to astronomers in Australia, Europe and the US....
And now for the real story.......
The real number is 10X's higher.... bout fell out of my chair.... (on a side bar, the number of "earth" like planets in just the milky way (just 1 galaxy, ours) is estimated to be 60 billion...
(reference image below)
This is a deep field shot from the Hubble.. it took something like 10 days to record and if viewed from earth, the area is roughly the area of a head of a pin at arms length... (Boy I love this stuff!)
Note that these are not stars, they are complete Galaxies...
Download the unmodified 3000X2400 image