The Stars Like Dust...

While watching a science video with my students, the narrator was discussing the odds of finding life in the Universe and how we have been at it for a very short period of time. Then, the narrator states, "For every grain of sand on the Earth, there are a million stars in the Universe." I was stunned at trying to comprehend such a truely incomprehensible number. To say that it is mind blowing is an understatement of monumental proportions. I remember answering this question once,"How many stars are there in the universe?" and the only answer I could come up with was, "There are more stars in the Universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on all the Earth." Even this statement is somewhat understated when one sees pictures that come from the Hubble Space Telescope and the ability it has to peer deeply into the Cosmos. The picture I include here is from Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and was taken over 40 hours in September 2003. There are about a dozen foreground stars but the rest of all the "dots" in the picture are galaxies. Dozens upon dozens of galaxies in an area that at first seems to be blank and devoid of any bright objects. Incroyable.
And now I am sitting in my house listening to Jon Serrie's song for a planetarium show... space music... "The Stars Like Dust".... The Universe is a mystery sometimes.