Now Keep Wondering...!

ANY GUESS HOW MANY ATOMS ARE OUT THERE..???



That is a really good question that came up to me and with my sheer instinct of being restless until i get an answer, i had to scroll about some 50 pages over the net - to find the answer to my own question.

Well,It is actually extremely complicated
and as i have read that lots of astronomers and even mathematicians spend their entire
careers trying to answer it.

But I will tell you what i do know, sort of.

Actually the number of atoms in the Universe is a relatively finite number.
That is to say, it does not really change by any appreciable amount. So,
if there are 100 atoms in the Universe, there will always be 100 atoms in
the Universe.

There is a small problem though. According to Albert Einstein,
matter and energy are the same, and under certain circumstances they can
be made to interchange (this happens in nuclear reactions that take
place in nuclear bombs and at the center of the Sun). So, it is
probably more accurate to say that the total energy of the Universe is
constant, it doesn't change.

Counting all of these atoms is the difficult part. In astronomy, people
use a lot of math to make guesses about how much matter (atoms) but there are challenges like how stars and galaxies respond to each other
(gravity). Then they look at how much stuff (atoms) they can actually count
and they always come up short.

This is called the dark matter.
A lot of work is being done to find this dark matter since they
know it is there but cannot be seen.
For example some of this might be
locked up in black holes, or in black holes in the middle of galaxies to
name a few possible places.

I must be sorry for such a long post, but it was a very difficult
question. Just to give some perspective on how many atoms
it might be, the number of atoms alone in the graphite in the pencil is
about 25000000000000000000000 atoms... In just the pencil lead! WOW!

But, i should probably give a number to use, just in case you
are interested. This won't include dark matter, brown dwarf stars, dwarf
galaxies and such, but we will count the atoms in a star and multiply this
by the number of stars in the Universe, since that is mostly what we
can see when we look out.

A typical star weighs about 2x10^33 Grams, which is about 1x10^57 atoms of
hydrogen per star... That is a 1 followed by 57 zeros.
a typical galaxy has about 400 billion stars so that means each galaxy has
1x10^57 X 400,000,000,000 = 5x10^68 hydrogen atoms in a galaxy
There are possibly 80 billion galaxies in the Universe, so that means that
there are about:

5x10^68 X 80,000,000,000 = 4x10^79 hydrogen atoms in the Universe. But
this is definately a lower limit calculation, and ignores many possible
atom sources.










~ And that's Insanity of an Atom-Bomb at Work..!!