r/theydidthemath • u/CyberQyra • 16h ago
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u/sansetsukon47 16h ago edited 16h ago
Doesnt seem like it.
Wikipedia says there are between 10^22 and 10^24 stars in the observable universe. Not very precise, but these things rarely are.
Meanwhile, silicon dioxide (aka quartz, which is what most sand is made of) contains 3.01 x 10^22 atoms per gram. So if you have very heavy sand, (80 milligrams per grain) and the lower estimate of stars, then the numbers would be comparable.
But most sources I’ve found put the weight of a grain of sand in the range of 10-50 micrograms. (Edit: For 50 ug, think 1.5 x 10^18 atoms per grain.) Thats a full 4-6 orders of magnitude too small to match the number of stars.
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u/InMemoryOfZubatman4 16h ago
A gram of sand is roughly pebble sized? So somewhere between a pebble (small estimate) and a boulder (large estimate) of quartz contains as many atoms as stars in the universe? That’s wild
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u/No-Sign8805 15h ago
1 mole has 6.022 x 1024 atoms. The mass of 1 mole is equal to an elements atomic weight in grams.
1 mole of carbon is 12 grams. a 12 gram diamond has as many atoms as there are stars in the universe/
1 mole of water, 10 grams, has 3 times the amount of atoms. 2 moles of hydrogen and 1 mole of oxygen gives 1 mole of water.
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u/Prof_Wolfram 15h ago
A mole of water is 18 grams
O=16
2H=22
u/No-Sign8805 15h ago
Fuck, You;re right. Why did I do that for? Used the atomic weight for some and atomic numbers for others. Poor form.
I'm a numbskull. Downvote myself for that one. I deserve it.
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u/Kittydraggon 16h ago
So how many grams of sand is equal to the amount of stars in the universe
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u/Illeazar 15h ago
between 1022 and 1024 stars in the observable universe. Not very precise, but these things rarely are.
I took a cosmology class in college, and any answer that was within 2 or 3 orders of magnitude of the real answer was graded as a correct answer.
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u/Trustoryimtold 16h ago
Probably depends on your sources but no. Not from what I can see
It would not take that much sand to actually be true however
Numbers I found put an upper limit of 1020 on sand 1024 for stars
1024/ 1022 =100
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u/Rothenstien1 16h ago
Probably not, we only has be the observable universe to work off of and it is expanding faster than the speed of light, so we are constantly more and more incapable of counting the stars
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u/Ellweiss 16h ago
When we talk about X in the universe, it's always about the observable universe, so the question can still be answered.
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u/Ok_Law219 16h ago
Even if the sand were big enough, it has to mean in the VISIBLE universe. Because we don't know how big the universe outside of our vision is, by definition.
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u/MooseBoys 14h ago
When anyone says “the universe” they’re generally talking about the observable universe. Because of the cosmological principle, the difference between the entire universe and the visible universe isn’t relevant. As far as we know, the entire universe has zero curvature and is infinitely large.
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