Final answer:
Roughly how many solar systems would it take to tile the disk of the Milky Way? The answer is billions. The Milky Way is estimated to contain about 100 billion stars, and if half of these stars had their own systems, there could potentially be 50 billion solar systems within our galaxy.
Step-by-step explanation:
To determine how many solar systems it would take to tile the disk of the Milky Way, we must first consider the number of stars within our galaxy. The Milky Way is home to about 100 billion stars (10¹¹). Assuming that each of these stars represents a solar system, akin to our own with planets and smaller bodies orbiting the star, we can estimate that the disk of the Milky Way could be 'tiled' with on the order of billions of solar systems.
Given that a significant portion of stars are likely to have their own planetary systems, it wouldn't be wrong to surmise that the Milky Way could contain billions of such systems. The notion of 'tiling' in this context is of course metaphorical, since solar systems are three-dimensional and distributed throughout the volume of the galaxy, not just on a two-dimensional plane. Nonetheless, this analogy serves to provide a sense of scale when considering the vast number of stellar systems within our galaxy.
To elaborate, if we consider the number of stars with potential planetary systems, assuming that approximately 50% of these stars have planetary systems as per some astronomical estimates, we'd still arrive at an astounding 50 billion potential solar systems within our Milky Way.