• Question: how many planets are there in the universe

    Asked by jonny1234 to Ben, Clare, Ezzy, Mario, Sam on 13 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Elizabeth Pearson

      Elizabeth Pearson answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      There are a septillion stars (1 followed by 24 zeros …ish) in the universe and it seems that more stars have planets than don’t so there are quite a few!

    • Photo: Clare Burrage

      Clare Burrage answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      We don’t really know yet, it’s only in the last few years that we’ve been able to build sensitive enough telescopes to see planets around other stars. But it seems that a lot of other stars have planets around them, and as Ezzy says there are a lot of stars in our universe, so there are going to be an awful lot of planets!

    • Photo: Sam Vinko

      Sam Vinko answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      somewhere around 1000000000000000000000000, maybe more.

    • Photo: Ben Smart

      Ben Smart answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      We don’t know. The universe might be infinite, so there might be an infinite number of planets. There are only a certain number of planets that we could ever hope to visit though, the rest are just too far away.

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