The Universe Has 10 Times More Galaxies Than Scientists Thought
By Janneke Weitering, Staff Writer-Producer |
More than a trillion galaxies are lurking in the depths of space, a new census of galaxies in the observable universe has found — 10 times more galaxies than were previously thought to exist.
An international team of astronomers used deep-space images and other data from the Hubble Space Telescope to create a 3D map of the known universe, which contains about 100 to 200 billion galaxies. In particular, they relied on Hubble’s Deep Field images, which revealed the most distant galaxies ever seen with a telescope.
Then, the researchers incorporated new mathematical models to calculate where other galaxies that have not yet been imaged by a telescope might exist. For the numbers to add up, the universe needs at least 10 times more galaxies than those already known to exist. But these unknown galaxies are likely either too faint or too far away to be seen with today’s telescopes.