Today, February 23rd 2020, I began to publicise my new (this) website, www.art-beat.co.uk, by sharing news of it's availability on Facebook. I learned some surprising things as I investigated the subject of websites, and as I promised in my Facebook post today, here is some more information.
First a quick definition from Dictionary.com:
"A website is connected group of pages on the World Wide Web regarded as a single entity, usually maintained by one person or organization and devoted to a single topic or several closely related topics."
The numbers that follow are obviously approximate, and taken as at today's date.
- 1.5 billion websites exist
- 1.3 billion are inactive, typically draft pending publication, or delinquent due to unpaid invoices
- 200 million are active (barely 13%)
- 220 active websites exist for each star visible to the naked human eye in both hemispheres
- 380 new websites are created every minute
Out of all of those numbers, the one that took me by surprise the most was the one about active websites per star. Not so much because there are so many websites, but because there are so few visible stars compared to what I expected. This is what is behind the numbers:
Astronomer Dorrit Hoffleit of Yale University compiled something called the Yale Bright Star Catalog in which is tabulated every star visible from Earth to magnitude 6.5, the naked eye limit for most of us. A total of 9,096 stars across both hemispheres is recorded as visible across the entire sky. We can simply half that number to 4,548 stars, (give or take depending on the season), and so accommodate being able to see just half of the celestial sphere at any time. And this is all from the darkest sky.
There are, reassuringly, a lot more stars beyond the ones we can see with the naked eye:
- 1 billion trillion stars in the observable universe
- 100 billion stars in the Milky Way
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