Upgrade to internet 'backbone' means there are more web addresses available than there are stars in the entire UNIVERSE



Type away: When you enter a website address, your query is translated into a numeric code - and now we have trillions (and trillions and trillions)

The internet has just received its biggest overhaul since creator Tim Berners-Lee first typed 'www.' into a computer.

Before Wednesday, we were running out of website addresses - not the easy-to-remember ones like www.ebay.com, but instead the numeric ones known as IP addresses.

These are the strings of numbers which give each computer or internet-connected address a long, individual number from which they can send and receive transmissions.

IPv4, as the old system was known, provided 4.3billion addreseses, which sounds a lot.

And it definitely sounded a lot when the internet was still struggling through infancy in the 1980s.

But with the rise of the world-wide-web, smartphones, tablets and the proliferation of computers across the world, the limit was reached - already at stretching point in 2008.

So now IPv6 - Internet Protocol version 6 - has come online, and brings with it 340 undecillion potential IP addresses.

If you want to see this in numbers...



THE INTERNET IN NUMBERS - MAKING A CONNECTION

Cells in the human body:

100,000,000,000,000 Number of litres of water on this planet:

1,260,000,000,000,000,000,000 Smallest estimate of all the stars in our universe: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Largest estimate of all the stars in our universe: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ...Number of websites addresses available:

340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

So how many stars are there in the sky?

Frankly, we don't know yet - but from what we can see of the observable universe, we can make some estimations.

HOW DOES THE INTERNET WORK?

The old standard, IPv4, was structured like this: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, with each "xxx" able to go from 0 to 255 - that gave us out four billion addresses. But now IPv6 extends the xxx to this: xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx and allows each x to be either a number 0 to 9, or the letters 'a' through 'f' - giving us a lot more flexibility with the star-beating potential. If any canny-eyed readers wonder what happened to IPv5, it was invented - way back in the 1980s - but it was mostly to do with media-streaming, and never took off.

Universetoday.com gives a run-throug h of the current thinking, suggesting that an average gallery has between 100 billion and one trillion stars) obviously, lots of room for variation between those two numbers).

And current thinking - even if these numbers do look suspiciously similar - is that there is between 100 billion and one trillion galaxies in total.

This brings us up to a range of between 10 sextillion and 1 septillion stars, which if you want to see in naughts, your answer is above.



These estimates, however vague, are based on extrapolations based on the mathematics which estimate the potential mass of the entire universe, and what gravity within our galaxy tells us about the universe as a whole.

So, with only 30 years or so since the internet became reality, it already has universe-size ambitions.