I find this very had to believe – there are ten times more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth. Astrobiology Magazine points out just how large this estimated number of stars is:
Such large numbers–seven times ten raised to twenty-twenty powers–are beyond what is meaningful without an analogy to compare with it. The number of stars in the visible universe, for instance, is now comparable to some terrestrial references borrowed from a combination of science and poetry:
- ten times more than the number of grains of sand on Earth
- eleven times the number of cups of water in all the Earth’s oceans
- ten thousand times the number of wheat kernels that have ever been produced on Earth
- one hundred million times more than the number of ants in all the world
- one hundred million times the dollar value of all the market-priced assets in the world
- ten billion times the number of cells in a human being
- one hundred billion times the number of letters in the 14 million books in the Library of Congress
I demand a recount!