Keep them coming!

… or Al Gore’s house for maybe a day and a half.

GC

If you want numbers, then on average, stars in the nearby Universe produce about 4,600,000,000,000,000 Watts per cubic light year, but we see only 2,600,000,000,000,000 Watts of it. The rest is absorbed by dust. That’s enough energy to run a typical American house for… let’s see… carry the two… a gazillion years.

Scientists usually aren’t unclear on Units of Measure as such, but they sometimes speak fast and use words in their ‘civilian’ context (I used to wax raging when hippies would talk about energy), not stopping to think someone who thinks less clearly will be confused. Power and energy look pretty much the same to a layperson.

Energy is the inherent ability to do work, and has the same units as work. Power is work done or energy transmitted (or wasted, or created) per time unit. If the Universe produces 4.6E15 Watts, this means Joules per second, or roughly how many kilograms you could lift one meter high each second in Earth gravity. In an hour, the energy thus accrued would be 4.6E12 kWh.

So in an hour (if the new model is correct), a typical cubic light year of your local Universe creates $460 billion worth of power.

I’d have to agree with ShavenYak and disagree with bswift. Strictly speaking, you put a price tag on energy, not power.

So, haven’t people already been observing the amount of light coming out of galaxies in the far infrared (and maybe even microwave bands)? And if so, hasn’t that been included in the typical mass-to-light ratios for those galaxies?

So, yes, there’s a lot more mass in gas than in the stars in the universe, but in galaxies, usually there’s more mass in stars.*

*I personally don’t study galaxies, and this is just based on what I’m recalling offhand. However, I’m pretty certain this is right.

This pie chart, which must be dated, claims that it is 10 % of the gas component. bswift gets the reverse ratio, so I’m uncertain to within two orders of magnitude here.

“We are Stardust, We are Golden,
And we’ve got to get ourselves,
Back to the Garden”

“Of course, finding an outlet in a cubic light year (which is 1039 cubic kilometers) might be an issue.”

I have enough touble finding the outlet behind the couch – finally found it while watching “Blink”…

I find it a bit ironic too; here on Earth, we worry about the carbon we dump into the air, and thus try to reduce it.
Out in space, these stars that produce power by a rather clean method for our means on Earth also are pumping out carbon.

Funny, isn’t it?
Not that’s it’s a reason to ignore our issues with carbon….

As brought up by Pieter Kok, bswift and Richard B. Drummon.

Also: you (a) may want to clairfy the power output as 460 billion dollars *per second* [I'm assuming], and (b) Pleeease use scientific notation for the numbers of huge!

Though there is a bit of a nifty-factor in seeing a massive number of zeroes following a digit.

I don’t get it.

*See?

Using these numbers I get about 0.001 solar masses per cubic light year in gas and about 0.03 solar masses per cubic light year in stars.

The sun’s luminosity is 3.8×10^26 Watts and using this as a “typical” star, that gives us about 10^25 Watts/LY^3 (so I don’t know where Phil gets fewx10^15 Watts/LY^3 above…my estimate can’t be that far off.)

I … um … like pretty pictures.