Question

What is the order of magnitude of the distance of Sun to nearest star in meters?

Answer 1

Answer:

Mercury, 46,001,272 km from the sun at the nearest point.

Explanation:

Answer 2

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.