SEXTILLION STARS
Baku, December 4 (AZERTAC). The estimate, contained in a study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature, is based on findings that there are many more red dwarf stars the most common star in the universe than once thought.
Astronomers have been counting and re-counting the stars for the last five years - much like the Bush-Gore election results.
The study by Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum and Harvard astrophysicist Charlie Conroy questions a key assumption that astronomers often use: that most galaxies have the same properties as our Milky Way and that conclusion is deeply unsettling to astronomers who want a more orderly cosmos.
When scientists previously estimated the total number of stars, they assumed that all galaxies had the same ratio of dwarf stars as the Milky Way, which is spiral-shaped. Much of our understanding of the universe is based on observations made inside our own galaxy and then extrapolated to other galaxies.
But about one-third of the galaxies in the universe are elliptical, not spiral, and van Dokkum found they aren`t really made up the same way as ours.
Using the Keck telescope in Hawaii, van Dokkum and a colleague gazed into eight distant, elliptical galaxies and looked at their hard-to-differentiate light signatures. The scientists calculated that elliptical galaxies have more red dwarf stars than predicted.
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