Glenn Elert
bent | chaos | eworld | facts | physics
The Physics Factbook™
Edited by Glenn Elert -- Written by his students
An educational, Fair Use website
topic index | author index | special index
| Bibliographic Entry | Result (w/surrounding text) | Standardized Result |
|---|---|---|
| Vidali, Gianfranco, Marco Falcioni & Eric Gregory. Galaxies. SETI Module Astronomy Tutorial Page. Syracuse University. | "Our own Milky Way, a typical giant spiral galaxy, includes at least 100 billion stars in its diameter." | 100 billion |
| Encyclopedia Britannica. Astronomy. 2000. | "There are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy" | 100 billion |
| Eddington, A. S. The Interior of a Star. 1926. | "The Sun belongs to a system containing some 3,000 million stars." | 3 billion |
| Boorstein, Daniel J. Discovery of the World. New York: Random House, 1983: 320. | "… the Galaxy is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters." | innumerable |
| Butterworth, Paul. Stars in Our Galaxy. Ask a High-Energy Astronomer. 1998. | "We can only see a few thousand stars at most with our unaided eyes. These are a mixture of stars which are nearby, and bright stars which are further away; but they are only a tiny fraction of the 100,000,000,000 stars in our own galaxy." | 100 billion |
The night sky has always been a source of endless wonder andspeculation. It is the origin of innumerable number of myths,legends and other stories. Yet while the number of ideas and answersto the mystery of the sky is unfathomable, so is the number ofstars out there.
When looking up at a night sky, only a small amount of starscan been seen by the naked eye. In fact it is an amount so smallthat it is a comparable to a handful of sand on the beach. Whilethe exact number can't be known just yet, many estimates havebeen given.
Stars are giant spheres of gas, mainly hydrogen and helium.Most of them, with the exception of the Sun, are trillions ofmiles away. Because they are so far, they seem to us like littlespecks of light, but in actuality they can be millions of mileswide in diameter. Stars are located in galaxies, but a galaxycontains more than just stars. Clouds of dust and gas, callednebulae, are where stars are born.
In our galaxy alone, the Milky Way, there is a predicted 3billion to 100 billion stars. It is impossible at this point toknow which the true value is; it may even be larger than thought.So while the stories and myths live on about the night sky, theexact number of stars is still not known, as space is truly thefinal frontier.
Marissa Wager -- 2000
External links to this page:
| Another quality webpage by Glenn Elert |
|
home | contact bent | chaos | eworld | facts | physics |
