How many stars are there in the universe?

Brace yourself for some big numbers. Astronomers believe there are probably somewhere between 1 sextillion (21 zeros) and 1 septillion (24 zeros) stars in total:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

or…

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That’s based on recent discoveries that there are a lot more tiny, faint stars lurking in large galaxies than previously thought, and some educated guesswork on the total number of galaxies themselves.

Even the smaller figure is 10 times larger than the estimated number of grains of sand that exist on Earth.