50. 'Merica. In reality, that number is a tad hard to accumulate. We can do our best by estimating somewhere around the magnitude of 10^20, and probably higher. The reason its so hard to give an exact answer is that the observable universe is extremely large, and growing exponentially. The picture above is of a very tiny patch of space that we thought was dark, with a redshift dating the light in this image to about half a billion years after the big bang. There's roughly 10,000 galaxies in this image, each with anywhere from thousands to trillions of stars within them. And that's just in this small patch of sky, that we thought was dark.