Sunday, May 1, 2022

Stars in the sky

According to what I read, we can only see about 5,000 stars with the naked eye, out to a distance of only about 4,000 light-years.  That is in a galaxy with 100 to 400 billion stars and a diameter of 100,000 light-years.  

The Milky Way Galaxy is only about 1,000 light-years thick.  That seems pretty thin compared to its diameter.  So a distance of 4,000 light-years would represent a volume of 50+ billion cubic light-years for just 5,000 visible stars.  That is roughly 10 million cubic light-years per star.

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