Atoms in a grain of sand => http://crafodbacea.nnmcloud.ru/d?s=YToyOntzOjc6InJlZmVyZXIiO3M6MjE6Imh0dHA6Ly9iaXRiaW4uaXQyX2RsLyI7czozOiJrZXkiO3M6MjQ6IkF0b21zIGluIGEgZ3JhaW4gb2Ygc2FuZCI7fQ== If a grain is a fraction of mg, 1 g of grain has truly more atoms than stars in the universe. It's hard enough to comprehend the billions of galaxies and the trillions of stars. The point is this - that between 10 19 and 10 87 there are more than enough orders of magnitude to account for every atom in the universe. One grain or sand is therefore 1. A grain of sand is defined as having a diameter of 0. That means, the numbers to consider are just half its square root. This gives sand a molar mass of 60. What about on the banks of rivers and inland lakes? If a of sand takes up 0. So potentially 8 orders of magnitude variation. Since you have 3 atoms per molecule its quartz and yes you can call its elementary unit molecule in this its about 4 quadrillion atoms unless i missed something. New beaches are created and destroyed on a regular basis, so the number would change. Nevertheless just a funny example for illustration, I have thought about what I would do if I gave lectures at the university. Tough questions then arise regarding the unexplored oceanfloor, which includes a lot of silt the same composition, butdifferent size per particle than sand. I win a hug if there is less. Are There More Grains of Sand Than Stars? - Although lower numbers 1, 2, 3 etc. How many galaxies are there estimated to be in the universe? Here's an old, old, question, but this time with a surprise twist. The question is — and I bet you asked it when you were 8 years old and sitting on a beach: Which are there more of — grains of sand on the Earth or stars in the sky. Obviously, grains and stars can't be counted, not literally. Science writer David Blatner, in his new book Spectrums, saysbeing well-versed in all things beachy, tried to calculate the number of grains of sand. atoms in a grain of sand They said, if you assume a grain of sand has an average size and you calculate how many grains are in a teaspoon and then multiply by all the beaches and deserts in the world, the Earth has roughly and we're speaking very roughly here 7. That's a lot of grains. Well, to my amazement, it turns out that when you look up, even on a clear and starry night, you won't see very many stars. But we're not limiting ourselves to what an ordinary stargazer can see. Our stargazer gets a Hubble telescope and a calculator, so now we can count distant galaxies, faint stars, red dwarfs, everything we've ever recorded in the sky, and boom. Now the population of stars jumps enormously, to 70 thousand million, million, million stars in the observable universe a 2003 atoms in a grain of sandso that we've got multiple stars for every grain of sand — which means, sorry, grains, you are nowhere near as numerous as the stars. So that makes stars the champions of numerosity, no. This is when Blatner hits us with his sucker punch. Let me repeat: If you took 10 drops of water not extra-big drops, just regular drops, I'm presuming and counted the number of H 2O molecules in those drops, you'd get a number equal to all the stars in the universe. This is amazing to me. For some reason, when someone says million, billion or trillion, I see an enormous pile of something, a grand scene, great sweeps of desert sand, twirling masses of stars. Big things come from lots of stuff; little things from less stuff. But I will remind myself that at the other end of the scale, in the nooks and crannies of the physical world, in the teeniest of places, there are equally vast numbers of teenier things.