Is there any (approximate) count/estimate/guess of the number of Stars of our Galaxy in millions/billions?
606528
200 billion stars in the Milky Way.
16428
If your question is based on what you can see as well as are actually above us and that you are a young person with pupils that will dilate to ~ 7mm tops AND you are observing from a dark dark site with steady seeing conditions (very little "twinkling" of the observed stars)...I think around 15,000 "bright" (we won't get into "limiting magnitude" as that is a large variable) stars is a safe guess. However, technically due to the fact that the as you look towards the constellation Sagittarius in the summer from the N. hemisphere you are looking towards the center of the Milky Way (our galaxy name). That  splash of "cloud" is the combined light of (as C. Sagan would say) "billions and billions" of stars.\nThat latest estimation of our sister galaxy Andromeda is upwards of 300 billion stars alone (it's number of orbiting stars that are influenced and follow it's spin has just recently been upped quite a bit). The current estimate for the Milky Way is 250 billion...however it has also recently been re-classified as a "barred spiral" and no longer a pinwheel shape like "whirlpool spiral". So...who knows a re-estimation of it's star number content may change.\nIn general most galaxies average out to have between 200 - 300 billion stars.\n\nNow...if we take all the assumptions mentioned above (about your eyes, seeing conditions etc) and we add to the number 15,000 of bright individually distinguishable stars in the Milky Way and the number of stars represented by the glow of the Milky Way and the number of stars in the Andromeda galaxy (which a kids good eyes should be able to see ...no sweat) well then the number you can see goes...WAY UP... Carl Sagans answer is an understatement.
171357
Unfortunately we do not have any concrete evidence.  Here is a good quote by the late Carl Sagan:\n\n"There are some hundred billion (1011) galaxies, each with, on the average, a hundred billion stars. In all the galaxies, there are perhaps as many planets as stars, 1011 x 1011 = 1022, ten billion trillion. In the face of such overpowering numbers, what is the likelihood that only one ordinary star, the Sun, is accompanied by an inhabited planet? Why should we, tucked away in some forgotten corner of the Cosmos, be so fortunate? To me, it seems far more likely that the universe is \nbrimming over with life. But we humans do not yet know. We are just beginning our explorations. The only planet we are sure is inhabited is a tiny speck of rock and metal, shining feebly by reflected sunlight, and at this distance utterly lost."
251053
There are ~200,000,000,000 stars in our galaxy. There are at least 80,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe, and reasonable estimates are from 80 billion to 400 billion. Estimates of the total number of stars in the universe that I've seen start around 3 followed by 16 zeroes, and a reasonable approximation would be in the neighborhood of 4.8 x 10^22.\n\nNow, we don't know of a single star that is known to NOT have planets; in fact, any planet within an order of magnitude or two of the mass of Earth is far too small for us to even detect, with the exception of those in very unusual systems, such as the one in the link below, which orbits a pulsar (it's also 1/5 the mass of pluto, but even if it were Earth-sized, a pulsar probably wouldn't be very conducive to life forming).\n\nWe also don't know exactly what conditions it takes to form life, how long those conditions need to last, or how long planets normally stay within that range of conditions.\n\nHowever, we can make some estimates.\nThe sun is a G-type star, and, although F-K type stars might be capable of supporting life (and such make up ~64% of the stars in the galaxy), we'll ignore everything but the 18.7% of stars which are G-type.\n\nFurther, let's say that only 1 in 10,000 G-type stars has a planet capable of forming life.\n\nNow, there is, on average, about 1 supernova per galaxy per century, so we'll have to eliminate some candidate stars on that; say about 99% of eligible stars do not form life as a result of radiation bombardment from nearby supernovae.\n\nThen, let's estimate that it takes 100,000,000 years for life to form, and the average planet only has 4,000,000,000 years of its lifespan where life can survive. Then, we have to figure out how many planets have life at any given time. The approximate lifespan of the sun is 10 billion years, so we'll figure that's about average for a G-type star.\n\nWe'll assume that no star has more than one habitable planet, and that no life colonizes any other planets. Then, we'll figure that only 1% of the planets which are still eligible actually have life.\n\nThat still leaves 3-4 planets currently inhabited, in our galaxy alone, including Earth. Multiply that by, oh, say, 1% of the minimum number of galaxies in the universe (just for the fun of it), and we still get nearly 3 billion currently inhabited planets.\n\nSo, I'd say that the answer is a pretty resounding "yes". Although most of them would be extinct long before we could concievably detect their existence, and even if not, they would be extinct for many millenia before we could communicate with them.
224500
Wikipedia claims that the observable universe contains about 7 × 1022 stars, organized in about 100 billion galaxies, which themselves form clusters and superclusters. An Ask the Scientist response to this question claimed that there are about 10 billion (10^10) stars in an average galaxy, \nand there are about 10 billion galaxies that we can observe in the universe, so the answer is 100 billion billion or 10^20. I don't think it is an issue that we have a precise answer for as yet.
552570
"Our own Milky Way, a typical giant spiral galaxy, includes at least 100 billion stars in its diameter." \n100 billion\n\nEncyclopedia Britannica. Astronomy. 2000. "There are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy" \n100 billion\n\nEddington, A. S. The Interior of a Star. 1926. "The Sun belongs to a system containing some 3,000 million stars." 3 billion\n\nBoorstein, 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."\ninnumerable\n\nButterworth, 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." \n100 billion
188805
How many stars are there in the sky?\n\nSeriously, I don't know if there's a number you could get that would be accurate.  Between banks, credit unions, grocery stores (mine actually has its own), plus the countless independently-owned ATM's at gas stations and convenience stores, you are deep into the millions for sure.
1075736
So far, we can only detect fairly large planets around nearby stars in our own galaxy.  However, the number of planets we are discovering shows us that planets are very common.  There is no reason to think that other galaxies would be any different.\n\nWe don't have sensitive enough tools yet to detect Earth-like planets, but they probably exist. We don't yet know how common life, intelligent or otherwise, is in the universe, but considering how many galaxies there are and how many stars in each one, it seems as though there should be other intelligent beings out there somewhere.
310199
1 x Star ("Sol"/"The Sun")\n9 x planets\n140 x satellites (moons) [approx.]\nasteroids [1,000s]\ncomets [by guest appearance only]
588202
The total number of known stars is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, when we write this number out. This figure would be pronounced as "ten billion trillion" stars.\n\nAs technology improves, this number will continue to increase since there are many more stars out there.
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.
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."
117146
It's the same way that scientists look at all massive measures: density*volume.  The density (ie the number of stars per square lightyear) is assessed by counting the frequency of galaxies and the size of galaxies.  The mass of galaxies can be inferred by the speeds of rotaion, and the mass will give you an idea as to how many stars there are in the galaxy by looking at the average mass of a star.  Then you get a sense of how many galaxies are in a given volume of space.  They use this, and extrapolate from the size of space (set by the tenets of general relativity, the Big Bang theory, the red-shift observed speed of expansion, etc), and they can thereby infer how many stars there are in the universe.\n\nIt's like the mass of the earth.  We can't figure it out with 10 kilograms, or even 100 kilograms, but we can get an idea as to the magnitude of the mass.  With magnitude, i mean the number of digits to the left of the decimal place.  We call the difference between 10 and 100 "one order of magnitude," and the difference between 100 and 100,000 "three orders of magnitude."  Such scales are commonly used in science for things where exact numbers are impossible to get, but the range of magnitude is important.  Some such commonly known scales are the measure of sound in decibles, the Richter scale for earthquake power, and the pH scale for acidity.  With a pH of seven, one can infer that a liter of water has 3,344,000,000,000,000,000 hydronium ions per liter, whereas it only has 3,344,000,000,000,000 hydronium ions per liter at a pH of 10.  In these cases, the magnitude, rather than the exact number, is the matter of interest.\n\nIt's the same in counting stars.  We can't know the exact number of stars, especially since they constantly form and die--but we can get a pretty good idea as to the magnitude of the number by looking at stellar density and extrapolating the size of the universe.
683582
There are about a couple hundred billion stars in our galaxy. The stars close to the center are not likely to have planets because of dynamical considerations (other stars pass by too frequently to have stable orbits).\n\nThe BIG question is how many planets there are per star on average. Our sun has ten planets and assorted other objects. We have found many other planets orbiting other stars, but most of those stars have only one planet (that we have detected). One has three planets that we know about. HOWEVER, the way we detect these planets favors detecting large planets that are very close to their star. Once you start to ask about planets as small as Saturn, or that are farther away than Mercury is from our sun, the methods don't work so well.\n\nThe upshot is that we really just don't know how many planets a typical star has. Some probably have none. How many have none? We don't know. How many have ten smallish planets? We don't know. At best we can guess, say 4-5 on average. This would give close to a trillion planets in our galaxy. The number could easily be a tenth of this, though.
1007479
Yes.  Beyond our own Milky Way galaxy there are estimated to be 200 billion more galaxies in the visible universe at distances up to 13 billion light years from Earth.
50134
Given the number of stars in our galaxy alone, its highly probably that a star like our own sun exists with satellites like our earth orbiting it.  Of course if you're looking for a name of another planet with life on it you won't find that just yet.
662250
The number I usually see quoted is 4000, but checking with Google.....\n\nFrom my suburban location, without optical aid, I can see down to about magnitude 5 on a really good night around 2am when there's little traffic and stores are closed.  That's about 2822 (actually less, since  I never see some southern hemisphere stars).  In my binoculars, I see down to magnitude 8, or 77,627 stars.\n\nNow, out in the country, a person with good eyes on a dark clear night can see down to magnitude 6, which is 8768 stars total.   A person with a 6-inch refractor telescope can see down to about magnitude 13, which gives 15,431,076 stars.\n\nOn the other hand, I read a book by an astronomer who said he could see down to magnitude 8 on top of Mauna Kea breathing oxygen from a tank.  That's 77,627 stars with no optical aid.\n\nNow-- for stars seen and unseen, there are about 400 billion stars in our galaxy.  \n\nIn the known universe?  The CNN story linked below says 70 sextillion.  That's 7 with 22 zeros.\n\nIn the whole universe, known and unknown?  Nobody knows--we do not even know if the universe is finite or infinite.  The number could be "infinity".