Poets borrow the number of stars in the sky to express the abundance of love they carry in their chests for a moral entity such as a beloved or homeland.

In her song “Light Up the Letters,” based on a poem by poet Abdul Rahman bin Musayat, melodious Arabic singer Asala Nasri says: “Light up the sky, light up the stars with your love.” Were the poets right in their choice of stars? Or more precisely, how many stars are there in the universe?

According to astronomers, if you look at the sky on a clear night, you will see thousands of stars, approximately 6 thousand. This limited number is related to your visual abilities, not a lack of stars. Because it is only a small fraction of all the stars in the universe.

How many stars are there in the universe? One question really puzzled scientists, so they resorted to approximate approaches and measurements to numerically constrain the number of stars.

The closest rule of thumb for astronomers is to estimate the number of stars in a typical galaxy, then multiply that by the estimated number of galaxies in the universe.

To do this, they take very detailed pictures of small areas of the sky and count all the galaxies they see in those pictures. This number is multiplied by the number of images required to photograph the entire sky.

Based on deep-field images from the Hubble Space Telescope, there are about two trillion galaxies in the visible universe.

Some estimates put the Milky Way galaxy at 100 billion times the mass of the Sun. Averaging over the types of stars in our galaxy, this results in a total of about 100 billion stars in the galaxy.

Using the Milky Way as a model, we can multiply the number of stars in a typical galaxy (100 billion) by the number of stars in the universe (2 trillion), and then we will find the answer to the question. The number of stars in the universe is 200 billion trillion stars or 200 sextillion in the universe. What an astronomical number! It is truly astronomical, figuratively and literally.