The whole universe? Absolutely. Even the smallwst infinity is larger than any countable sum.
The visible universe, meaning those close enough that a photon could have passed from there to here since the “big bang” faded enough to allow such transmissal? I don’t know offhand.
A simple web search suggest that our galaxy has less than 10^11^ stars – 400,000,000,000 or so. ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way )
Finding our other figure is a bit harder, since trusty Wikipedia doesn’t include a direct figure and the first few articles I could find was from the BBC and used number names instead of scientific notation, which is ambiguous at this scale. ( in the long scale we only have milliardaires, and Elon Musk’s brief paper fortune was a billion rather than trillion.)
Thankfully a NASA articke linked to what appears to be the underlying research paper, and gives us a helpful number of 2x10^12^. (2,000,000,000,000)
…nasa.gov/…/STScI-01EVSR313NHNAC17DF62MP9QV9.pdf
So, if the paper is right then, yes, there are more galaxies in the observable universe than stars in the Milky Way. But, the paper was an indirect measurement that increased the galaxy count by a whole order of magnitude, so there may be only 2x10^11^ galaxies. Except, of course, that the estimate of stars in the miky way was an estimate and could be as little as 1/4 of the number I cited above…
And if the paper is wrong and the truth of the estimate is in the middle, both of our numbers could be 2x10^11^, with approximately one star in our galaxy for every galaxy in the observable universe.
ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 hours ago
There are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy. There are about 200 trillion galaxies in the parts of the universe that are observable from earth. Which is to say, galaxies outnumber the stars in our galaxy by about 20 to 1.
If we limit it to stars we can see with the naked eye, then instead of 100 billion stars, you’re down to something like 5,000 to 10,000 stars depending where on earth you are observing from. In which case galaxies in the observable universe outnumber the stars we can see about 20 billion to 1.