Mission to count no. of stars

• The Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment-2 (CIBER-2) was launched by NASA from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, USA.
• The aim of this mission is to count the number of stars that exist in the Universe.
• Scientists have estimated that on average each galaxy consists of about 100 million stars.

How will CIBER-2 count stars?

• Once the instrument is above Earth’s atmosphere, it will survey a patch of sky that will include dozens of clusters of galaxies.
• The instrument will not actually count individual stars but it will instead detect the extragalactic background light, which is all of the light that has been emitted throughout the history of the Universe.
• From all of this extragalactic background light, the CIBER-2 will focus on a portion of this called cosmic infrared background, which is emitted by some of the most common stars.
• Essentially, this approach is aiming to look at how bright this light is to give scientists an estimate of how many of these stars are out there.