“There are more stars in the galaxy than trees on Earth.”

The most reliable sources are NASA (Source 1), ESA (Sources 2, 5), Yale News (Source 3), and Steward Observatory (Source 4), all with authority scores of 0.9, which consistently report 100 billion stars in the Milky Way while Yale's authoritative 2015 study establishes 3.04 trillion trees on Earth. These trustworthy sources clearly refute the claim since 3.04 trillion trees vastly exceeds 100 billion stars by a factor of approximately 30, making the claim mathematically false.

The evidence consistently supports ~100–500 billion stars in the Milky Way (NASA Imagine the Universe [1], ESA [2/5], StarDate [6], Space [11]) and ~3.04 trillion trees on Earth (Yale News [3], corroborated by others), so the only valid inference from these figures is that trees outnumber Milky Way stars by several-fold. The proponent's appeal to “uncertainty/undercounting” (Space [11]) does not logically justify crossing the specific threshold needed (>3 trillion stars), so the claim is false on the provided evidence.

The claim omits the critical quantitative context that makes it false: all authoritative sources converge on ~100-500 billion stars in the Milky Way (Sources 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 11) versus 3.04 trillion trees on Earth (Sources 3, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16), meaning trees outnumber stars by a factor of 6-30 times. The claim's framing creates a fundamentally false impression by presenting the relationship in reverse—the mathematical reality, clearly established across multiple high-authority sources from NASA, ESA, Yale, and astronomy institutions, is that Earth has approximately 3,000 billion trees compared to the galaxy's 100-500 billion stars, making the claim's core assertion demonstrably incorrect.