system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How many photons does a star produce?

I just had an idea that almost fried my little brain. Here it goes, I'm sorry if I make any mistakes in explaining the idea: a star is a sphere that sends out photons in every direction from the surface of the star. When you move out a billion light years and you look at that star, once the photons have caught up, you will see the photons reaching you from across all that distance in space.

My problem is: you will see the light from the star from a billion light years away, in every direction. The star has then sent out photons that cover a sphere with a radius of a billion light years. That's got to be a stupefying amount of photons. If photons are particles, it seems to me it would be impossible to send out quite that many particles in all directions, it would make more sense if the photons then were a wave, because a wave propagates in all directions.

So, are the photons then a wave or particles?

I don't even know if this is the right kind of question.
gpt
The total power output of the sun in the form of radiation is about 4x10^26 watts.  Dividing by the energy of 1 photon at the sun's peak wavelength (4x10^-19 Joules), you get roughly 10^45 photons per second, which is a pretty large number.

But again, Ruiner has a good explanation for why they don't act like shooting billiard balls.