This is a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer. The problem is that we cannot directly see every star in the Milky Way because most are located behind interstellar clouds from our vantage point in the Milky Way. The best we can do is to figure out the total mass of the Milky Way, subtract the portion that is contributed by interstellar gas and dust clouds (about 1 - 5 percent or so), and then divide the remaining mass by the average mass of a single star. But since most stars are smaller than the sun in mass, the actual number of stars that these mass estimates represent can vary anywhere from 250 billion to as much as 1 trillion depending on what
assumptions you want to make for the number of small stars this mass
represents. “
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