Tuesday, 20 January 2015

the sun - How many sun-like stars are there in the universe?

This is a question that concerns the initial mass function (IMF) - an empirical (that is, defined by observations rather than theory) function that describes the statistical distribution of stellar masses.



Edwin Salpeter (1955) was the first to describe the IMF, though if you read Chabrier (2003) there are some reasonably comprehensive explanations of the theory and history. However, these lecture notes are a fair bit more accessible.



From the approximations in the UCSC lecture notes I linked above, I get that around 4% of stars are between 0.7 and 1.3 solar masses (92% are between 0.1 and 0.7 solar masses!).



There are perhaps 100 billion stars in a galaxy and 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, giving something on the order of $4times 10^{20}$ (400 billion billion) stars that are about ($pm 30%$) one solar mass.

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