Number of Stars In The Milky Way

[michael.suede]

My ever curious mind has wandered on to this topic as I have generally been thinking about just how rare (or frequent) the occurrence of life is among planetary bodies.

In thinking about this, I decided to look up just how many stars are estimated to be in the Milky Way and ran into some odd numbers.

Eddington postulated 3 billion, which is drastically smaller than the currently accepted theory of 200 billion.

In looking at the current number, its obviously a gross distortion because they are attempting to calculate the number of stars based on the rotation rate of the galaxy using Einsteinian nonsense, they also are adding and subtracting out dark matter in these equations which further distorts the real number.

So, what I'm looking for is a simple estimate based on the average of observable stars in a given area.

Does anyone know of any papers that present such arguments?