The number of trees on Earth exceeds the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.. How is that?

Arabia Weather - The Milky Way Galaxy is considered the mother galaxy that contains the solar system in which humans live. When viewed from Earth, it appears as a blurry band of light in the night sky, made up of stars that cannot be identified with the naked eye. In the past, astronomers believed that it contained all the stars in the universe, until the scientist Edwin Hubble corrected this belief and showed that it was one of an infinite number of galaxies. The Milky Way Galaxy is a narrow spiral galaxy, about 87,400 ± 3,590 light-years in diameter, and about 1,000 light-years thick at its spiral arms. Moving at about 600 kilometers per second, at its center is a supermassive black hole with a mass of 4.1 million solar masses.

Since it likely formed after the Dark Ages of the Big Bang, and with a population of stars as old as the universe itself, the galaxy may have formed shortly after the big event. Many scientists point out that about 90% of the Milky Way's mass is invisible to telescopes, and is called "dark matter." As for our solar system, it is located in a radius of about 27,000 light-years from the galactic center.

There are more trees on Earth than there are stars in the Milky Way

Although our galaxy may contain an estimated number of between 100 billion and 400 billion stars, some scientists indicate that the number of trees on Earth far exceeds this number, exceeding 3 trillion trees. This large number has sparked great controversy.

One common fact spread in many references indicates that there are more trees on Earth than there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. The origin of this claim goes back to a research paper published in September 2015 in the scientific journal Nature. The paper gives an estimate of the number of trees on the planet at 3.04 trillion. This number is divided into 1.30 trillion in tropical forests, 0.74 trillion in subtropical forests in boreal regions, and 0.66 trillion in temperate regions.

On the other hand, NASA indicates that most estimates of the number of stars in the Milky Way range between 100 billion and 400 billion stars. Based on these numbers, it can be said that the popular information about trees outnumbering stars in the Milky Way Galaxy is realistic and correct. However, it must be noted that estimating the number of trees around the world and the stars in the sky is very difficult. The paper's estimate is based on taking 428,775 actual field measurements from selected regions, and then creating mathematical models to extrapolate on a global scale. To calculate the number of stars, astronomers rely on estimating the mass of the galaxy by studying its rotation and spectrum using spectroscopic analysis, but this method does not lead to accurate numbers, but rather approximate estimates.

Source: millionma3loma