Astronomers Keep Counting Stars That Aren't There

When we estimate stellar populations across the cosmos, we're not measuring stars—we're measuring our confidence in a category nobody fully agrees on. The precision is real. The thing being measured is not.

Brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, and stellar remnants occupy undefined zones between 'star' and 'non-star'

Historical counts have inflated by orders of magnitude as definitions shifted, not because observation improved

The 70 sextillion figure assumes stable definitions that astronomy has never settled on