When we look up at the night sky, it seems that each point of light is a separate world, a separate story. The question "how many stars are in the sky?" is both simple and incredibly complex. The answer to it is not a number, but a whole philosophy of infinity, science, and beauty. Visible and invisible: how much can we see with our eyes On a clear night without the moon, a person with normal vision can see about five thousand stars. At first glance, this seems like a lot, but it is only a tiny part of what actually exists. The main mass of light in the universe is hidden behind dense clouds of cosmic dust or is too far away for our eyes to detect it. Even through the most powerful telescopes, we see only a limited segment: billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars. Trying to count them all is like trying to catch the sea tide in the palm of your hand: it's never going to happen, but the desire to understand evokes a shiver. Science estimates: the number of stars in our galaxy The Milky Way, our native galaxy, contains about a hundred billion stars. Some are the same as our Sun, while others are giants so bright that their light can illuminate tens of thousands of our nights. But the Milky Way is just one galaxy among about two trillion in the Universe. Every glance at the sky reveals not just a point of light, but an entire cosmic ocean. And this number becomes almost unimaginable: hundreds of billions of trillions of stars. For human consciousness, such numbers already lose their familiar meaning, turning into a sense of infinity. Stars and time: a view through millions of years Each star is not only the light we see now but also a history that happened millions or billions of years ago. The light from the nearest star to us, except for the Sun, takes four and a half years, and from the farthest — billions of years. We are looking into the past, not the present. Imagine seeing the light from a star that has long since gone out. It's like looking thro ... Read more