Do you believe this incredible statement I heard on tv about how many planets exist?

Imagine if they used all the grains of sand from Tatooine to say the number of planets

That is just a reference used to help us understand the immensity of this Universe and it was not meant literally. Smile

Probably true. It’s not like he was counting.

What @JustmeAman said, and consider the source.

Wait, that’s not right.

There are eight planets in the solar system.

There are probably as many planets in the universe as there are grains of sand on every beach, though. We’ve found tons of exoplanets just within our own neighborhood of our galaxy, and there’s billions and billions of galaxies.

They meant to say there are approximately that many planets in the universe, not the solar system.

Not solar system. I screwed that one up. )-:

@aster I think we all knew what was meant just as the grains of sand and what was meant.

I’ve heard that analogy as well, and heck yes I believe it. Hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone, and an estimate of 125 billion galaxies in the universe according to the Hubble Deep Field means a heck of a lot of stars. As we’ve found out, a lot of stars have planets, and our technology can’t even find most of the smaller (as in, earth size and smaller) ones.

On a side note, stuff like this makes me excited for things like the Kepler Mission, which is currently looking for earth-sized exoplanets, and, once finished, should give us a good estimate of how prevalent they are in our galaxy.

I wonder where the stars come to a stop? Or do they? If they don’t stop , I guess that’s infinity, right? So “they go on forever’ would be totally impossible to imagine or describe.

In the universe there are probably more planets than any of us could number. I don’t know about the solar system.

@Aster The stars and galaxies come to a stop (although new stars are born and die everyday). The stars, galaxies, black holes etc. are only a small percentage of the universe. The rest is just a vast sea of nothingness, well, not nothing, but some type of energy.

We can’t with our limited knowledge and capabilities even come to terms in our mind with the vast Universe out there. Our limited restricted life can only think on a 3 dimensional level where there is a beginning and an end to things. Most would think about going through the Universe and finally come to the rim or edge and some try to explain it like a circle that you start from where you first started eventually.

@JustmeAman totally agree.

-In the solar system, no (i see you corrected that already)

-in the galaxy, maybe. there are about 400 billion stars in our galaxy, if they all have say 5 to 12 planets a piece then that is a lot of planets.

-in the known universe, for sure. there are thousands and thousands of galaxies that we can see.

-in the known universe and beyond. without a doubt, there are probably more planets out there than the sum of all the atoms it takes to make up our entire solar system. (including all the hydrogen and other stuff in the empty space between the planets)

I believe there are more. There are stars we can’t even see. So, there are planets we can’t see. The universe is immense.

I believe it. It’s not because we don’t know about some things that they can’t exist.

Our solar system is just a countless speck (even our own Milky Way Galaxy is). No this does not surprise me.

Makes you imagination go wild uh?

I’ve read that there are about 100 billion galaxies in the universe and about about 100 billion stars per galaxy.

Assuming that there are about as many planets as there are stars (some stellar systems have several planets but I think there are some stars without planets), then there could be about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 sextillion or 10^22) planets in the universe.

This guy estimates that there are about 4.8X10^21 grains of sand on Earth, so there might be more planets in the universe than there are grains of sand here, but quantitatively, they’re in the same neighborhood.

Re: my previous post:

If the universe is perceived as all the beaches in the world, then the Earth is comparatively smaller than a grain of sand, and yet it’s the home of over 6 billion humans and I guess trillions of other living things.

Now I too feel that astounding smallness that I think others have expressed. :-0