How many stars can we count?

HOW MANY STARS CAN WE COUNT?

On some occasion, we have all looked up at the sky on a clear country night and wondered how many stars there are in the universe if we already count hundreds of them with the naked eye. Although it is difficult to give an exact number, some scientists have made an estimate and from Antiquus we want to tell you about it:

First of all, we will have to ask ourselves the first question: What is a star? Well, a star is a large sphere of hot, glowing gas. Stars produce their own light and energy through a process called nuclear fusion and are largely made up of gas and plasma. Our parent star is the Sun, which belongs to the Milky Way galaxy.

Precisely in order to calculate the total number of stars in the Universe, it must be taken into account that they are grouped in galaxies and not randomly.To obtain a universal figure, scientists apply a measurement system similar to that of grains of sand on a long beach; they count the stars in a small volume (the Milky Way) and multiply it according to the dimensions and depth of space. This gives a figure of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. This is only an estimate, since obviously not all galaxies have identical characteristics, just as on a beach not all areas have the same number of grains of sand.

In reality, the maximum number of stars that we can see with the naked eye in the whole sky is of the order of 6000 and, on any clear night without the Moon, we can see a maximum of about 2000 stars.The closest star we can see to the Earth is a star that is close to 2,000, taking into account haze, pollution and the difficult visibility of stellar bodies towards the horizon.

The closest star to the Earth is the Sun. Other stars are visible to the naked eye from the Earth at night, appearing as a variety of fixed luminous points in the sky due to their immense distance from the Earth. Historically, the most prominent stars were grouped into constellations…