Two weeks until Rosh Hashana! Now's the time to tell everyone in your social networks to download Days of Awe - Mi Yodeya?. Handy shortlink: s.tk/miyodeya

Any search sleuths around?

or maybe my brain made this up

but I seem to remember someone asking a question about lending a book to a non-Jew and them ruining it

or something like that

@msh210 I wrote this comment, but then I wanted to make sure I'm not wrong:

I'm not wrong, right?

@anybody else who likes math

@Daniel Right. To make this answer meaningful, it would have to somehow indicate that there are on the order of 1,000,000 non-Zodiac stars for every Zodiac star.

@IsaacMoses I was surprised that the answer had so many upvotes

that's why I was nervous that somehow my math was wrong

but the answer definitely seemed to be saying "we know that there are a lot of stars, and look how close chazal was to the huge number"

... also, the answer demonstrates nothing about the state of contemporaneous non-Jewish astronomy at the time that the Midrash was written. I suppose if it established that the scientific consensus at the time was that there are thousands of stars, then the Midrash saying that there are many times more than that could be said to be ahead of its times.

but really they weren't even close

@IsaacMoses true

and in fact, that's probably the case

@Daniel What @IsaacMoses said.

(Not that he needs my haskama. Just 'cause you asked me personally.)

@IsaacMoses although 10^18 is closer to thousands than it is to 10^24

At least on a linear scale

But on a logarithmic scale, that's right

And that's probably how we should be talking about stars in the universe