Questions and Answers

How many atoms are there in the world?

The quick answer is: more than you can count! But we can get an estimate of the number of atoms in the earth by first knowing what its mass is. The mass of an object is a measure of how much material the object has. The mass of the earth is 5.98*10²⁷ grams. That's the scientific way to write a large number that has a lot of zeros. We can write the mass of the earth with all the zeros like this:

5,980,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grams

Below is a table that shows the breakdown of the fractional amount of the earth for the most abundant types of atoms (also called the element). Some of these values are estimates since we really don't know exactly what the center of the earth is made of but scientists have pretty good theories about it. In the table is also a list of how many grams a mole of an element weighs. The bottom line is that there are about 1.33*10⁵⁰ atoms in the world. If you want to write it with all the zeros it would be:

133,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Author:

Drew Weisenberger, Detector Scientist