I very slowly zoomed in on the actual words in the post.
Started off processing “molecule” as “mole”, “solar system” as “galaxy”, and thinking “ha, don’t know if that’s true but it sounds both plausible and neat”.
There are definitely more hydrogen atoms in a mole of water than stars in the Milky Way.
The Milky Way has somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars according to Wikipedia (
1*10^11
to4*10^11
). A mole of water has6.022*10^23
molecules in it, each of which has two hydrogen atoms in it for a total of1.2044*10^24
hydrogen atoms.10^24 / 10^11 = 10^13
which is ten trillion. So, a mole of water has roughly ten trillion times as many hydrogen atoms as the Milky Way has stars.Wasn’t thinking moles, not that technical, but it sounded plausible vs. the number of stars in the Milky Way.
Wait…