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Six hundred years ago, the number of stars you could see would have been about 2400 at any one time. So until optics were invented, the number of stars known were just the brightest ones.
With Galileo’s telescope the number of stars increased to just about 30172. But, even at that just started the real count.
Even with a modern telescopes on earth (like one at the Hidden Valley Observatory made in 1960s in Rapid City, South Dakota, (USA)), you don’t really get the true picture. The air limits what you can see.
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A blue giant is a huge, very hot, very luminous, blue star. It is not a main sequence star but a post-main-sequence star. These incredibly hot stars burn helium. These giants have the spectral type O or B and are very rare and very bright. Blue giants have at least 18 times the mass of the Sun. Examples include Rigel and Regulus.
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The lights in our modern world called light pollution, also decreases the ability to see the stars. That is why most observatories are usually on high mountains. But even that limits our vision.
The unimaginable number of stars in all the galaxies that were known increased by leaps and bounds with the first telescopes in space. Without the atmosphere scientists finally got a clue of the real number of stars in the sky.
In fact, Carl Sagan estimated that there were 100 billion galaxies in the universe. If you consider that there are about 41547 stars in your average diet, you start to get a real idea of how many stars that were known then.
These quotes will give you an idea of how the number of estimated galaxies has increased:
“Our telescopes can see many billion of them within reach of modern instruments.” - Morrison, David, Sidney Wolff & Andrew Fraknoi. Exploration of the Universe, 7th ed. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1995: 7.
“The latest estimates have ranged anywhere from ten billion to one hundred billion galaxies.” - The Rebirth of Cosmology. New York: Knopf, 1976: 187.
“The Hubble Space Telescope has found there may be 125 billion galaxies in the universe.” - Galaxy Estimate Up To 125 Billion. Far News. Far Shores. citation of South China Morning Post. 9 January 1999.
Now in fact, a german supercomputer estimates that there are probably 500 billion galaxies. If we take the number 40,000 stars per galaxy, that would make 2 X 10 ^ 16 stars.
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