[Physics] How many stars are in the Milky Way galaxy, and how can we determine this

astronomygalaxiesmilky-waystars

I have heard multiple estimates on the quantity of stars within our galaxy, anything from 100 to 400 billion of them. The estimates seem to be increasing for the time being. What are the main methods that are used to make these estimates, and why are there such large discrepancies between them?

Best Answer

The estimates I've read are similar to yours: 200 to 400 billion stars. Counting the stars in the galaxy is inherently difficult because, well, we can't see all of them.

We don't really count the stars, though. That would take ages: instead we measure the orbit of the stars we can see. By doing this, we find the angular velocity of the stars and can determine the mass of the Milky Way.

But the mass isn't all stars. It's also dust, gas, planets, Volvos, and most overwhelmingly: dark matter. By observing the angular momentum and density of stars in other galaxies, we can estimate just how much of our own galaxy's mass is dark matter. That number is close to 90%. So we subtract that away from the mass, and the rest is stars (other objects are more-or-less insignificant at this level).

The mass alone doesn't give us a count though. We have to know about how much each star weighs, and that varies a lot. So we have to class different types of stars, and figure out how many of each are around us. We can extrapolate that number and turn the mass into the number of stars.

Obviously, there's a lot of error in this method: it's hard to measure the orbit of stars around the galactic center because they move really, really slowly. So we don't know exactly how much the Milky Way weighs, and figuring out how much of that is dark matter is even worse. We can't even see dark matter, and we don't really understand it either. Extrapolating the concentrations of different classes of stars is inexact, and at best we can look at other galaxies to confirm that the far side of the Milky Way is probably the same as this one. Multiply all those inaccuracies together and you get a range on the order of 200 billion.