Just how many stars are there in our universe? If we were to assemble a panel of distinguished internationally known astronomers from past history, we would get a very interesting result.
Hipparchus, a great Greek astronomer (146-126 B.C.), estimated that there were 1,022 stars. Ptolemy, another famous Greek astronomer (A.D. 100-170), placed the number at 1,056. Tycho Brahe, a great Danish astronomer (1546-1601), calculated that there were 777 stars. Finally, the brilliant German astronomer Johann Kepler (1571-1630) cataloged 1,005.
From 100 B.C. up until the 1600’s the consensus was that there were approximately 1,000 stars in the universe. Since then this estimate has been greatly increased. It is now common knowledge that our own Milky Way Galaxy contains over 100 billion stars. Most modern astronomers believe that there are also billions of galaxies just like our own. If we were to estimate 100 billion galaxies each containing 100 billion stars, we would have 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. Clearly it is not humanly possible to count these many stars.
However, over 2,500 years ago, God spoke to the prophet Jeremiah and said in (Jeremiah 33:22): “As the host of heaven cannot be counted and the sand of the sea cannot be measured, so I will multiply the descendants of David My servant…” The Bible said 2,500 years ago that there is no way to number the stars because the universe is so vast. Only with the advent of the telescope in the seventeenth century, 2,000 years after Jeremiah, did our modern astronomers begin to catch on that the heavens had quite a bit more than 1,000 stars.