• Question: How many stars have astronomers estimated to be in the Milky Way?

    Asked by megan44 to Colm, Eoin, Joseph, Lauren, Stephen on 14 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Stephen Scully

      Stephen Scully answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      There are about 100,000,000,000 (about 100 billion stars) in the milkyway galaxy.

    • Photo: Joseph Roche

      Joseph Roche answered on 16 Nov 2013:

      The estimations vary wildly. Anywhere from 100 billion to 400 billion stars. The interesting thing is that we now are confident that the ratio of stars to planets is about 1-to-1. So even though we haven’t found many of them yet, we’re pretty sure there are billions of planets in the galaxy!

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