Should Astronomers re-estimate how many stars are in our galaxy, taking into account small globular clusters?
Interesting! Well, as far as giant barred spiral galaxies go, Milky Way is indeed ordinary. Galaxies like ours which in the norm is very much like the sun or less have a typical star count. We also have a typical globular cluster population given its age and location within a galactic group. Let’s see. The average size for a spiral galaxy is 50,000 light-years which makes us roughly an exception but there are giant spirals close to thrice our latest diameter estimates. From that specs alone, we get a 200-400 billion star count rather average. Next, we go to stellar birth rate and death rate. The Milky Way may be greedy but not too much. We have not suffered a major collision with a galaxy close to half our galaxy’s diameter which may have promoted starbursts. That’s our neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy which has about a trillion stars due to a greedy meal of a probable elliptical close to 40,000 light-years in diameter about 8 billion years ago. Our birth rate is twice as M31 and in a fe
