Hundreds-of-billions-to-trillions of galaxies, trillion of stars

Image credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team.

The Universe, as far as the most powerful telescopes can see (even in theory), is vast, huge and massive. Including photons and neutrinos, it contains some 10^90 particles, clumped and clustered together into hundreds-of-billions-to-trillions of galaxies. Each one of those galaxies comes with around a trillion stars inside (on average), and they’re strewn across the cosmos in a sphere some 92 billion light years in diameter, from our perspective. But, despite what our intuition might tell us, that doesn’t mean we’re at the center of a finite Universe. In fact, the evidence indicates something quite to the contrary