a million stars are missing from the universe?
110474
and your question is ...?
670386
Count it's rings.\n\nSeriously, it's very difficult to know for absolute sure.  BUt recently scientists..cosmologists to be more precise...believe they are 95% certain of this...\n\n"In a study published today in the journal Science, a team of researchers says the universe is between 11.2 billion and 20 billion years old."\n\n"The new calculations, by Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Brian Chaboyer at Dartmouth College, involved new information about old star clusters in our galaxy and a better understanding of how stars evolve. It was based on when stars are thought to end the main sequence of their lives, a point at which they've used up the hydrogen that fuels thermonuclear fusion and therefore begin to dim."
1006929
Seriously, this is funny. Anyhow, there is absolutely no way of knowing how many planets exist in the entire universe as the universe as we know it is far to huge for any of our technology to fully explore. \n\nAnyhow, please stick with the topic. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with computers.\n\nThanks!
533448
if you could collect all the grains of sand,from every beach on this planet, that still wouldn't make up a fraction of the amount of stars out there,\nand out of all these stars,and the billions of planets surrounding them.Its hard to believe that life only exists on this little rock.
838886
That covers only one Galaxy - Milky Way\nThe whole universe is yet to be discovered .... by humans
441685
Thats one of the funniest questions I've ever heard, and definately a first.\n\nRatio...lol \n\nEven if someone could give you an accurate number it would be too large a number on the star side to even begin to comprehend, and too small a number on the freckle side to even be able to comprehend.  No one knows the exact number of stars, or even galaxies that contain them.
527724
All stars except the Sun appear to the human eye as shining points in the night sky that twinkle because of the effect of the Earth's atmosphere. Interferometer telescopes are required in order to produce images of these objects. The Sun is also a star, but it is close enough to Earth to appear as a disk instead, and to provide daylight.\n\nStars are not spread uniformly across the universe, but are typically grouped into galaxies. A typical galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars. The majority of stars are gravitationally bound to other stars, forming binary stars. Larger groups called star clusters also exist.\n\nAstronomers estimate that there are at least 70 sextillion (7×1022) stars in the known universe [1]. That is 70 000 000 000 000 000 000 000, or 230 billion times as many as the 300 billion in our own Milky Way.\n\nThe nearest star to the Earth, apart from the Sun, is Proxima Centauri, which is 39.9 trillion kilometers, or 4.2 light years away (light from Proxima Centauri takes 4.2 years to reach Earth). Travelling at the orbit speed of the Space Shuttle (5 miles per second -- almost 30,000 kilometers per hour), it would take about 150,000 years to get there. Distances like this are typical inside galactic discs, where the Sun and Earth are located. Stars can be much closer to each other in the centres of galaxies and globular clusters, or much further apart in galactic halos.\n\nCheck the wikipedia link below.
113742
No one can say for certain. Matter of fact we don't know exactly how many stars there are in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Most guestimates for the Milky Way run to about 250-billion stars. Then there are about 250-billion other galaxies in the observable universe, each with more or less 250-billion stars each. A reasonable ball park figure for total number of stars in the observable universe would be approximately---approximately!---   5^22. That's 5 followed by 22 zeros.
579713
Count the stars in a specific size region (say 1 minute square) and then multiply by the number of total regions that would cover the sky...\n\nHowever, this only counts stars visible to the naked eye and only works if you pick a region with an average density of stars.\n\nJust say it is "billions and billions" and leave it at that...
16585
There are approximately 100,000,000 stars in our Galaxy. Most stars are in binary or trinary systems. I'll guesstimate the number of stars in binarys is, oh...50,000,000. The answer is clearly in the several tens of millions.
1091585
You've awakened the starry-eyed dreamer in me at this late hour!  I should be sleeping, but can't resist your question.\n\nHow many other planets, do I think?  Actually my number is a lot higher than millions!  In fact, on this subject you get into numbers so large that most of us humans cannot relate them to anything in our experience.  So, sadly, I doubt we can appreciate the grandeur of the universe.  But let me try...\n\nOne fairly recent estimate says there are 70 sextillion *visible stars* in range of modern telescopes (70,000 million million million).\n\nTo help put that in perspective, I'll use a rather old but useful analogy.  Imagine scooping up a big handful of sand at the beach. Try counting the grains of sand.  You'll give up, most likely, in seconds, assuming you even bother to try.  Now look all around you on the beach, and think about *that* number.  Now think about all the grains of sand on *all the world's* beaches... and deserts.  Now multiply that total number by ten, and you get approximately the number above -- of stars in the *known* universe.  The stars not visible to us by even our most powerful telescopes may equal the visible figure -- or be multiples of it.  Mind-boggling, no?\n\nSo to your planet question:  One next has to wonder how many of those stars are actually a sun to one or more planets (hey, I just noticed that was your wording, too; I like it).  Does every star have at least one planet revolving about it?  \n\nWell let's just be very conservative and say that there are only 70 sextillion stars in the *entire* (not just known) universe.  Let's further say that only one tenth of those stars (7 sextillion) have a planet orbiting them.  If we assume merely one planet per sun, then there must be at least 7 sextillion planets in the universe.  Using our sand analogy, that's a planet per grain of sand on all the world's beaches and deserts!\n\nAnyone who believes that is a reasonable number must surely wonder, "How could there NOT be living beings somewhere other than the earth?"  \n\nOf course not all planets will have life on them.  Earth may be the only body in our solar system, for example, which does harbor life, though at least one of Jupiter's moons is also a tantalizing possibility.\n\nIf only one out of a *thousand* of those planets are earth-like -- in the sense that they are rocky, not gaseous, and contain liquid water -- there may be 7 quintillion earth-like planets in the universe.  That's 7,000 thousand trillion.  I've been very careful, but if my math or estimates are off by even a factor of a *billion* there could be 7,000 million earth-like planets in the universe, a figure I think is extremely low.\n\nThese figures seems to jibe fairly well with an estimate of the number of earth-like planets in our galaxy alone, found at space.com (the bottom link in my sources) -- 30 billion, from a 2002 article.\n\nMy personal belief, based on numbers such as this, and on the likelihood that any planet supporting life may contain (extremely conservatively!) a thousand species...  is that there are *billions* of intelligent species in the universe outside the earth.\n\nSince you were wise to point out that we reside in the Milky Way galaxy, which is only one of perhaps billions of galaxies, you might be fascinated by the Hubble photo in the references, below.  I liked it so much, myself, that I made it my new desktop wallpaper.\n\nFinally, on the specific subject of life, there is a well-known method of estimating the number of intelligent, communicating civilizations, called the Drake Equation.  In my references you can see how it works to condense all the possible stars down by multiple factors, leaving the fraction which we may be able to communicate with, or at least hear from!  \n\nHappy dreaming (for me, too), and I hope you are as inspired by all this as I am.   :-)
1034372
Lets look at the maths. If every star in this galaxy was a grain of sand ( approx. 100 billion ) you would have enough sand to fill an Olympic size swimming pool. how many habitable planets around each star ? Between 0 and 5 maybe. \n  There are approx 100 billion galaxies. Again if each star was a grain of sand  there would be more sand than on every beach on earth. The chances are there is life elsewhere and in all probability the seeds of life on earth came from somewhere else  as explained by the panspermia hypothesis.\n   And the alien abductions? ,,,we're just studying  8)
739473
Brad is right; there are around 3000 stars visible to the naked eye at a given moment under good seeing conditions. There are around 8000 visible in the whole 4pi sky.\n\nOur galaxy, the Milky Way, contains about 10^11 (100 billion) stars. There are about 10^11 galaxies, so about 10^22 stars in the whole universe.
440062
The universe contains approximately  200,000,000,000,000,000,000 (200 BILLION BILLION) stars in galaxies scattered throughout the universe.  Our solar system is located in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy.  The Milky Way galaxy contains approx. 200,000,000,000 stars.  \n\nThe universe is the largest of the three organizational structures in your question.  \n\nHope this helps!
28023
The observable universe is estimated to contain:\n10^11 galaxies, 10^21 stars, and 10^78 atoms.\n\nThe means 100,000,000,000 galaxies.
267355
estimated 100 billion galaxies containing 100 billion stars each
1005881
There are _trillions_ of stars in the Universe.  Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is composed of 300 - 400 billion stars.  There are _billions_ of galaxies in the Universe, many dwarfing the size of ours.\n\nThe chance of other life _not_ being out there is so close to zero that it can't even be calculated.  There are infinite possibilities in this Universe, and we haven't begun to study more than a tiny bit of them.\n\nTo anybody that has the audacity to say "no" there isn't, then get an ego check.  We aren't the only intelligent life in a Universe of infinite possibilities.