'Gold nuggets in night sky': Astronomers find 49 new galaxies in 3 hrs [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

49 new gold nuggets in our night sky discovered in less than three hours.

Maria Bolevich
Published: Mar 26, 2024 08:32 AM EST



‘Gold nuggets in night sky’: Astronomers find 49 new galaxies in 3 hrs
The MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa.

In three hours, you can read up to 100 pages, or you can find 49 new galaxies.

Back in 2016, thanks to a deep-sky census assembled from surveys taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories, astronomers concluded that there are at least 10 times more galaxies in the observable universe than previously thought to be the case.

How many galaxies are there in the universe?
Thanks to very deep Hubble Space Telescope images, it was approximated that the observable Universe contains about 100 billion galaxies in total, but, according to a study from 2016 led by Christopher Conselice, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Nottingham, the actual number is much higher.

The team discovered that the number of galaxies in our universe is at least two trillion, ten times more than previously thought, with the often quoted value of around 100 Billion.

Professor Conselice said back then: “We are missing the vast majority of galaxies because they are very faint and far away. The number of galaxies in the universe is a fundamental number we would like to know, and it boggles the mind that over 90% of the galaxies in the universe have yet to be studied.”

More:
https://interestingengineering.com/news/gold-nuggets-in-night-sky-astronomers-find-49-new-galaxies-in-3-hrs