Comments on: Number the Stars

By: María

María — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 23:15:37 +0000

I’ve always asked myself that question. Now it’s the first time i’ve really thought about it and i got it before reading yor solution! I’m so happy hehehe (i took your advice ).

Now i’d like to make a question about stars. Star blinks, so Could astronomers get confused about if it’s caused by the diversion of ligth or if it’s because that star is a binary star? or that’s impossible?

Thank you!

By: Lab Rat

Lab Rat — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 09:01:19 +0000

I was always terrible at those ‘guess the number of sweets in the jar’ games. i just used to say the biggest number I could think of and then add five to make it more ‘realistic’.

Great post…I had wondered before how they calculated things like star and planet numbers, i’d just assumed there were some kind of rapidly scanning computers hooked up to telescopes of something

By: excitedstate

excitedstate — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:53:42 +0000

With a lot more data about planets outside of the solar system, we might be able to hazard a guess as to the number of planets. We would need an idea of the percentage of stars with planets, and then go from there. A problem is that we can only see fairly large planets with current techniques.

But we would also want to know whether there is a correlation between the type of star and the likelihood that it would have planets. Then we should be able to number the planets based on our numbering of the stars.

Of course, this exciting search is just getting started.

By: Exoplanetology

Exoplanetology — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:52:42 +0000

If there’s no way “we can ever actually count all stars”, then the prospect of counting all exoplanets is even more mind-blowing.
Thanks for this post. You have inspired wonder in me. Now “Number the Planets” is a blog post begging to be written.