Let’s Talk Numbers: A Grain of Sand and the Universe Beyond
Imagine holding a grain of sand at arm’s length against the night sky.
Now picture the tiny patch of space that grain of sand would cover—barely a speck in the vast cosmos.
In 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), positioned nearly a million miles from Earth at a gravitational balance point known as Lagrange Point 2 (L2), turned its golden mirrors toward just such a minuscule region of space. What it revealed was awe-inspiring: thousands upon thousands of galaxies sparkling in the blackness. Not stars—galaxies. Entire galaxies in a view that small.
Each of those galaxies, much like our own Milky Way, contains an average of 100 billion stars. And according to modern astronomical estimates, each of those stars likely hosts around 1.6 planets on average. Some stars have more, some have fewer—but planets seem to be the rule, not the exception.
Now take this further: astronomers estimate that the observable universe contains around 2 trillion galaxies.
When you multiply all those numbers together:
2,000,000,000,000 galaxies
× 100,000,000,000 stars per galaxy
× 1.6 planets per star
You get a staggering total of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets, or 10²⁵ planets.
That’s 10 million trillion trillion. And remember: this is just what we can observe with current technology. The actual universe could be far larger—perhaps even infinite.
Why It Matters
This isn’t just a numbers game. These mind-bending statistics remind us of how much we still don’t know. With so many planets out there, it’s statistically likely that some might host life—or even civilizations. Instruments like the JWST help us peer deeper into the universe’s history and structure, bringing us closer to understanding not just where we are, but who we are in the vast cosmic story.
Every speck of light in JWST’s deep field image tells us that the universe is far more massive, ancient, and full of possibility than we once imagined. And it all begins with a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand.