The estimated number of stars believed to be in the observable part of our universe is generally considered to be 1024—that’s 1 followed by 24 zeros. The name for that number is one septillion. There is no good way to comprehend it. One of the best ways to try is to see how long it would take to count all those stars. If we could somehow count 1 billion stars per second, we would have to count non-stop for 30 million years. According to the book Stars and their Purpose by Werner Gitt, the estimated number of stars would require counting at an even higher speed of 10 billion per second for 30 million years. Suffice it to say that there is an absolutely astronomical number of stars.
The creative power of God is on full display with all those stars, yet they are just stars. While there is certainly variety among the stars, one thing they all have in common is a fiery, hot, gaseous surface, or an otherwise inhospitable nature. They are not places to land on and explore.
Planets are different; they are other worlds that aren’t on fire. In lots of cases, they can be explored. Mars, for example, has the largest known canyon system and the tallest mountain in our solar system. It also gets cold enough there that air freezes onto the ground in the polar winter. Venus has lots of volcanoes and is about 870° F. Jupiter has a storm wider than the Earth and a gravity so strong that it consumes asteroids and comets, and can even rip them apart on the way in. Its gravity even causes ground tides on its moon Io. The ground there rises and falls, the ground breaks open, and volcanoes spew lava up to 250 miles high. Saturn has a halo of rings caused by ice particles. Its moon Enceladus has huge geysers that spray liquid far into space. These other worlds have an otherworldly variety of fascinating features.
A big question has lingered for a long time. Are there other planets outside of our solar system? Planets are typically much smaller and dimmer than stars, so they are much harder to find. Directly photographing them is possible in some rare cases, but it’s extremely difficult to do.
Another method of detecting exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) is through detecting radial velocity. If a planet is large, it can noticeably pull back and forth on the star it orbits. As the star wobbles back and forth, its light is alternately squeezed and stretched. This wobble is visible as a redshift or blueshift in the light coming from the star.
One of the best and easiest ways to find exoplanets is to monitor the brightness of stars. Astronomers use telescopes to look for dips in brightness that occur at a regular interval when a planet passes in front of the star it’s orbiting. Using this method, the Kepler spacecraft has found over 2,000 planets orbiting around nearby stars. This has led to one of the most remarkable, slowly dawning discoveries of modern times. In recent years, astronomers have begun to realize that there are most likely more planets in the universe than there are stars!
What a tremendous expression of God’s creativity! He appears to have crafted countless millions of trillions of other worlds, each with its own unique colors, compositions, and characteristics. That’s definitely a far more mind-boggling concept than the 1024 number.