"Right. So that's a solar system. It contains a sun and some planets. There's usually just one inhabited planet per inhabited system - sometimes two, I don't know if I've ever heard of three - and there's only on the order of two hundred inhabited systems in total, but," he calls up a second holographic model, "that is a galaxy, and every tiny sparkle in the fog of tiny sparkles is an individual sun."

There are a lot of tiny sparkles. He enlarges the display until it fills the vid plate's entire active area, and there are still some places where the tiny lights cluster into an undifferentiated glowing mass.