How many of what kinds of stars live in other galaxies? It seems like a simple question, but it's notoriously hard to pin down because astronomers have such a difficult time estimating stellar populations in remote galaxies.
Now a team of astronomers has completed a census of over 140,000 galaxies and found that distant galaxies tend to have heavier stars.Even though astronomers lack a complete census of all the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, they've sampled enough of them to get a pretty good handle on the population.
We know, roughly, how many small dwarf stars there are, how many medium Sun-like ones there are, and how many giant ones there are.is enormously difficult. Most galaxies are simply too far away to identify and measure individual stars within them.Typically, astronomers just assume that the demographics of a distant galaxy roughly match what we see in the Milky Way because on average galaxies shouldn't be all that different from each other.