New observations suggests that the Universe may contain 10 times more Galaxies than we thought.
New deep space images from the Hubble Space Telescope reveal there could be a trillion galaxies, that is ten times as many as previously thought.
<small>Above image: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team
Astronomers used to believe the universe contains 100-200 billion galaxies. Now, the numbers are 10 times more.
After they converted images to 3D, they came to the conclusion that 90 percent may be too faint or far away to see.
Christopher Conselice, a researcher from the University of Nottingham, who led the study, said:
“It boggles the mind that over 90 percent of the galaxies in the universe have yet to be studied.
Who knows what interesting properties we will find when we observe these galaxies with the next generation of telescopes.”
In analysing the data the team looked more than 13 billion years into the past. This showed them that galaxies are not evenly distributed throughout the Universe’s history. In fact, it appears that there were a factor of 10 more galaxies per unit volume when the Universe was only a few billion years old compared with today. Most of these galaxies were relatively small and faint, with masses similar to those of the satellite galaxies surrounding the Milky Way.
source spacetelescope
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