Answer:
Approximating the Milky Way as a disk and using the density in the solar neighborhood, there are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.
Explanation:
Since we are making an order of magnitude estimate, we will make a series of simplifying assumptions to get an answer that is roughly right.
Let's model the Milky Way galaxy as a disk.
The volume of a disk is:
V
=
π
⋅
r
2
⋅
h
Plugging in our numbers (and assuming that
π
≈
3
)
V
=
π
⋅
(
10
21
m
)
2
⋅
(
10
19
m
)
V
=
3
×
10
61
m
3
Is the approximate volume of the Milky Way.
Now, all we need to do is find how many stars per cubic meter (
ρ
) are in the Milky Way and we can find the total number of stars.
Let's look at the neighborhood around the Sun. We know that in a sphere with a radius of
4
×
10
16
m there is exactly one star (the Sun), after that you hit other stars. We can use that to estimate a rough density for the Milky Way.
ρ
=
n
V
Using the volume of a sphere
V
=
4
3
π
r
3
ρ
=
1
4
3
π
(
4
×
10
16
m
)
3
ρ
=
1
256
10
−
48
stars /
m
3
Going back to the density equation:
ρ
=
n
V
n
=
ρ
V
Plugging in the density of the solar neighborhood and the volume of the Milky Way:
n
=
(
1
256
10
−
48
m
−
3
)
⋅
(
3
×
10
61
m
3
)
n
=
3
256
10
13
n
=
1
×
10
11
stars (or 100 billion stars)
Is this reasonable? Other estimates say that there are are 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way. This is exactly what we found.
= characteristic wavelength = 9 μm = 9 x 10⁻⁹ m