Every point of light is a Galaxy
Each point of light in that image is a galaxy. Not a solar system, a galaxy.
Each galaxy contains hundreds of billions if not trillions of stars. Want to try to count the points in that image and do the math?
I’ll do a quick approximation, since pretty much every pixel in that image is lit up (not to mention the fact that there are other galaxies behind the ones visible here because this is just a two dimensional projection of a 3 dimensional space). There are 391,040 pixel in that image (for reference, there are approximately 170 billion galaxies in the current known, visible universe). Galaxies range anywhere from 10 million to 100 trillion (yes, trillion) stars, so lets go with a trillion stars as an average (because I’m guessing they obey a bell curve distribution and not the 50.000006 trillion median between the observed star amounts).
That means in this image, you are staring at almost 400 thousand trillion stars. And, percentage-wise, you’re looking at 0.000002% of the currently human-observable universe.
400 thousand trillion stars, 0.000002%. How many of those have planets? Pretty much all of them, I’d guess.
If you take 1 trillion stars as the galactic average (I couldn’t find a good approximation but if anyone’s got an idea please comment), that’s 170 billion trillion stars in the observable universe.
170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. We currently have no idea what the average amount of planets around them is but I’m guessing we can add some multiple of the aforementioned number.
And this is just what we can currently see. Do you begin to get an inkling of the possibility present in our universe?
We used to think regular matter was indivisible. Then we found atoms. We though they were indivisible, then we found quanta. We currently think they are indivisible.
Every time we claim to have found the bedrock, the end-all, be-all… we find something else to continue our scientific search. There may indeed be a limit to these things, but I’ll believe that when I see the end of science.
Tags: absolute wonder, holy shit