Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable

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makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

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Hello, welcome to More or Less, your guide to the Numbers in the News and in the Universe.

This week, listener Danny Keller wrote in with a math's problem of

cosmic proportions. I recall hearing there are more stars in the universe than

all the grains of sand on all of the world's beaches.

Every time I go to a beach, this statement comes to mind.

I would love to hear your research into this.

The statement Danny is thinking about comes from the American astronomer and

master of the universe, Carl Sagan, who said it on his TV show Cosmos, which was a massive hit in the 80s.

The total number of stars in the universe is larger than all the grains of sand than all the beaches of the planet Earth.

So what's the answer?

Our intergalactic correspondent Havier Zapeter

has been lying on the beach and watching the stars.

Yeah, I can't work out if my mind has expanded or shrunk this week because once you start trying to work this out you end up dealing with some painfully

big numbers. I'm talking agonizing your massive. These figures are so gigantic that the very

act of trying to hold them in my mind has deleted important parts of my brain

...