Think about how many stars exist in the universe.
It’s hard to wrap your head around. Astronomers estimate there are 170 billion galaxies in the parts of the universe we can see, which extends 13.8 billion light-years in every direction.
If you multiply the number of stars in just our own galaxy by 170 billion, you get a septillion stars (that’s a 1 followed by twenty-four zeros). Of course, the true number may actually be infinite, given that the universe is much larger than we can observe and could simply go on forever.
The vast majority of those stars are completely irrelevant to us, because we can’t even see them. On a moonless night, you can spy maybe 9,000 stars with the naked eye, and a good pair of binoculars might get you to 200,000.
That alone is a lot of stars. And they are mostly too far away to have any direct impact on us.
But one star is different.