Final answer:
Counting all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy at one star per second would take about 100,000 years, given that the galaxy contains roughly 100 billion stars.
Step-by-step explanation:
If you were to count all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy at a rate of one star per second, it would take approximately 100,000 years. This is because the Milky Way Galaxy is estimated to contain about 100 billion stars. If you count one star per second nonstop, without taking any breaks, it would take you around 3,171 years just to reach 1 billion stars. Now, if we scale that up to 100 billion, it indeed takes roughly 100,000 years to complete the count, making option A the correct answer.
To put these numbers in perspective, one light-year is the distance light travels in a single year at a speed of 300,000 kilometers per second. With a light-year being such a long distance, you can imagine the staggering number of light-years it would cover if we were to travel across the whole Milky Way.
Additionally, the vast number of stars in our galaxy are so far apart that even traveling at the speed of light, it would take tens of thousands to millions of years to cross it. As a mathematical exercise, this underscores the limits of continuous growth and the enormous scale of our galaxy.