Was God showing off when He made our Milky way?
NGC 5584 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) " Billions and billions " of stars in a galaxy (after a quote often mistakenly attributed to Carl Sagan) is how many people imagine the number of stars you would find in one. Is there any way to know the answer for sure? "It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. You can't just sit around and count stars, generally, in a galaxy," said David Kornreich, an assistant professor at Ithaca College in New York State . He was the founder of the "Ask An Astronomer" service at Cornell University. Even in the Andromeda Galaxy — which is bright, large and relatively close by Earth, at 2.3 million light-years away — only the largest stars and a few variable stars (notably Cepheid variables ) are bright enough to shine in telescopes from that distance. A sun-size star would be too difficult for us to see. So astronomers estimate, using some of the techniques below. Massive investigation The primary way astronomer