How did they come to the conclusion that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth?
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Imagine you have a really big jar full of candies, and a small jar full of marbles. You want to find out which jar has more items without counting each candy and marble one by one, because that would take forever!
So what you can do is, first, take a small cup and scoop out some candies from the big jar. You count how many candies are in that cup. Let’s say you count 100 candies.Next, you do the same thing with the marbles. You scoop out some marbles with the same cup and count them. This time, let’s say you count 10 marbles.
Now, you can estimate how many candies and marbles are in the jars. If the big jar is 100 times bigger than the small cup, and the small jar is 10 times bigger than the small cup, you can guess that there are about 10,000 candies (100 candies x 100) and 100 marbles (10 marbles x 10) in total.
Scientists used a similar idea to estimate the number of stars in the universe and the number of grains of sand on Earth.For stars, they looked at a small patch of the sky using telescopes and counted the number of stars in that patch. Then they figured out how many similar patches would cover the entire sky and multiplied the two numbers to estimate the total number of stars in the universe.
For the sand, they took a handful of sand and counted the grains. Then they estimated how many handfuls would make up all the beaches and deserts on Earth and multiplied the two numbers to get the total number of grains of sand.
When they compared the two numbers, they found out that the number of stars in the universe is much, much bigger than the number of grains of sand on Earth!
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