Are there more stars than grains of sand on the Earth’s beaches?

Carl Sagan is famous for state there are more star in our Universe than there are grain of moxie on all the beaches on Earth . But is this actually possible ? It ’s an awesome dubiousness — and a capital apology to do some math .

We lie with there are 100 to 400 billion ace in the Milky Way and more than 100 billion galaxies in the Universe — maybe as many as 500 billion . If you multiply star by galaxies , at the low end , you get 10 billion billion stars , or 10 sextillion stars in the Universe . That ’s a 1 followed by 22 cypher . At the high end , it ’s 200 sextillion .

These are mind bogglingly huge numbers . How do they compare to the telephone number of grains of sand on the collective beaches of an integral planet ? This eccentric of grit measures about a half millimeter across .

You could put 20 grain of sand packed in side - by - side to make a centimeter . So 8,000 metric grain could fit in one three-dimensional centimeter . If you took 10 sextillion grain of sand , put them into a ball , it would have a radius of 10.6 kilometers . And for the high end of our appraisal , 200 sextillion , it would be 72 km across . If we had a domain bigger than the Earth , it would be an easy answer , but no such luck . This might be close .

So , is there that much guts on all the beach , everywhere , on this major planet ? You ’d require to figure the average bulk of a sandlike beach and the average amount of the world ’s coastline which are beaches .

I ’m hold out to travel along the estimate and calculations made by Dr. Jason Marshall , aka , the Math Dude . According to Jason , there about 700 trillion cubic metre of beach of Earth , and that forge out to around 5 sextillion grains of sand .

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Jason reminds us that his math is a rough estimate , and he could be off by a cistron of 2 either elbow room . So it could be 2.5 sextillion or there could be 10 sextillion grains of gumption on all the man ’s beach .

So , if the modest end estimation for the number of whiz matches the gamey oddment estimate for the number of grains of grit , it ’s the same . But more likely , there are 5 to 10 times more superstar than there are grains of George Sand on all the world ’s beach .

So , there ’s the result . For some “ back of the napkin ” math we can guess that there are more stars in our Universe than there are grain of backbone on all the beach of Earth .

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Oh , one more affair . Instead of grains of sand , what about corpuscle ? How enceinte is 10 sextillion atoms ? How vast would something with that monolithic amount of anything be ? Pretty mammoth . Well , relatively at least . 10 sextillion of anything does vocalise like a whole lot .

If you were to make a pile of that many atoms , pretend how big it would be ? It ’d be about four times small than a junk mite . Which mean , a single grain of sand has more atoms than there are star topology in the Universe .

This articleoriginally appearedat Universe Today and is republish here with license .

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