10 to the 15th power
How much is that, 10^15? A lot. A new survey of the universe has been released and a map of that survey is shown above (Dr. Chris Fluke of Swinburne University of Technology). The map contains 100,000 dots and each dot represents a galaxy. A galaxy is thought to contain an average of roughly 100 billion stars each. So what you are looking at is a representation of a number of stars that is too large to comprehend, 10 to the 15th power. The volume of what you see is 13 billion billion billion cubic light years. Uh, that’s a lot. For a better look: http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~cfluke/6dF/0001.tga.jpg
This the result of two years of work so far, the goal is 250,000 galaxies mapped. For the information on how this is being done check out this article: http://asia.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=1981