SORRY. I GOT IT WRONG ABOUT THE NUMBER OF STARS !!

About the number of stars, I got it wrong. I went wrong with the numbers.


I said that their best effort was unimpressive. Sorry. I was wrong.


I uncritically accepted the estimates of the newspapers and the television channels and also gave credence, more than I ought to have, to the estimates the organizers of the NASA have put out.


In my last post about the number of stars I said: “NASA claimed that the most recent estimates place the number of stars in the observable universe at around 10 power 23. Thats a 10 with twenty-three zeros after it. They even said, the universe is so big, it doesn’t even make sense to talk about how big it is. Observers of the event estimated the stars were somewhere around a billion. Those numbers were the high points.”



It turns out that everybody was trying to play safe, actually. Every media house in the state and every media person representing the so called national media wanted to be politically correct. Being politically correct in reporting the number of star means not to displease  NASA. To swallow hook line and sinker the tall claims of the NASA and publish them. While reporting , they were all unanimous in saying that there are innumerable number of stars. Telugu papers were lyrical in describing the number.


Sri Adusumillii Jayaprakash, an associate in our effort to refute the NASA claim, has done a clinical analysis of the visuals of theStars.
This is the picture of the Stars.

As you can see, squares of equal size are superimposed on it to make calculation easy.
It is clear that some portions are very densely crowded while others are quite sparsely occupied. But to be generous, let us assume that the entire area is uniformly dense and take the densest portion as the basis to do our calculation.

This part of the picture is from the densest portion.

Now let’s do the numbers.

You will find 25 stars across and 20 from top to bottom in the square. This means, per square, there are 500 stars. There are stars in 30 squares. The rest of the area has planets or satellites in which there are no stars. 500 stars per square. In 30 squares. That brings the number to 15,000.



Yes. 15,000.


If you think I am too miserly and nit picking, then double it up if you like.



And you will have 30,000.


That is if you take all the squares to be as dense as the densest one, although they are not. And then if you double the number, although you don’t have to.


That is the best number that you can give to the number of stars.


My friend Jayaprakash looked at it from another angle too. He is very meticulous.



An acre is 45,560 square feet. According to our calculation an acre thus can take 13,080 inspired stars. If they are not sufficiently inspired, then even less. But at this point of time, we are talking about only highly inspired stars. So it is 13,080.


Let us now see the physical dimensions of the  area occupied by the stars. It is 1300 feet long and 100 feet wide. It’s width is actually not uniformly 100 feet throughout the entire length of 1300 feet. But still, let us take it that it is uniformly wide by 100 feet.


The stars  thus occupied a space of 1,30,000 square feet. But that area includes planets and all that. However, let us for a moment assume that the stars gathered there used every inch of the area available.


At the rate of 25 stars per one hundred square feet, the gathering could not have been more than 32,500. And if 30 stars squeezed into the same space, then we arrive at a figure of not more than 39,000.


In my last post I said that their best effort was unimpressive. Sorry, I was wrong.


It is, in fact, pathetic.


Now it is even clearer why the NASA lions that roared about the accurate  number of stars had to quietly leave the place after reading this article.


With tails between their hind legs.

Dedicated to Parakala Prabhakar

Twitter Handle : @parakala

PhD from LSE, Political Economist, Policy Consultant, Dabbles in Politics, Music Lover, and TV Presenter