“billions and billions”

“Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars” from youtube

I used to watch “Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars” youtube videos on
the computer together with my grandchildren sitting on my lap.
When they were watching, they sang as well. To them, the number
of stars in the sky is too many and countless, and to me the number
of stars in the universe is a “天文數字“, “billions and billions”, as
what I have learned.

In his “Cosmos" TV mini-series, Carl Sagan, an American astronomer
and cosmologist, used to say “billions and billions". When he was
imaging the total number of stars in the universe, he rhapsodized
about “billions upon billions”.

A recent new study suggests there are 300 sextillions of them,
three times as many as scientists had previously calculated. That is
a 3 followed by 23 zeros, or 3 trillion times 100 billion. Get it ?
It is 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

It is only a huge “天文數字“ to me anyway. Charlie Conroy, a Harvard
astrophysicist, however found the number to be fun, because it gets
you thinking about these large numbers. He said the number of stars
in the universe “ is equal to all the cells in the humans on Earth”,
noting there are 50 trillion or so cells in an average human body and
there are 6 billion people on Earth. Multiplying 50 trillion by 6
billion, he came up with about 300 sextillions.

No matter how large the number is, it is another “天文數字“ to me.
I however still enjoy watching those "visible" stars twinkling or
glittering in the night sky.

Star (星) was a favorite subject for many of the ancient Chinese poets:

“星垂平野闊 月湧大江流” in “旅夜書懷” by 杜甫 was a notable poetic verse.

李白, in his poem “夜宿山寺”, wrote:

危樓高百尺 手可摘星辰
不敢高聲語 恐驚天上人


Yeh Tze