On a clear night, the sky looks crowded with tiny lights. Some twinkle. Some glow steady. They look close enough to count, but they are not. That question pops up in curious minds: How many stars are ...

Look up at the sky on a clear night, and you'll see thousands of stars – about 6,000 or so. But that's only a tiny fraction of all the stars out there. The rest are too far away for us to see them.

Astronomers have found evidence that the proportion of large and small stars varies with the environment where those stars ...