Question: Is there any way to measure how many stars in the Milky Way are born and how many die each day?

Nick Wright answered on 11 Mar 2014:

It’s very difficult to measure that precisely because it would take such a long time to count and we can’t see all the stars in our galaxy because some are very far away and faint.

Instead we often choose an area of the sky and we count the stars that are born in that area and the stars that die in that area and then we scale those numbers up to the entire galaxy.

At the moment we think about 1 star is born and 1 star dies in our galaxy about every year. That doesn’t seem like much perhaps, but our galaxy has been forming stars and stars have been dying for billions of years, so it adds up to a lot!