Ever heard anyone saying “Go big, or go home”? Well, apparently the universe took it in a literally way.
1. It was believed until now that the universe contained 100 billion galaxies. But now we know, it doesn’t…
2. In fact, there are 2 trillion galaxies, which is 10 times more galaxies than were previously thought.
3. An international team of astronomers used deep-space images from the Hubble Space Telescope to create a 3D map of the universe.
4. 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.
5. The thing is that these galaxies are not visible to our telescopes. These unknown galaxies are too far away to be seen with today’s telescopes
6. Why? Because the universe is expanding, the light that reaches us is subject to a phenomenon called “redshift”, which makes only some stars visible to us, so all we get to see is a dim light.
7. Looking far out into deep space also means looking back in time, because light takes a long time to travel across cosmic distances.
So, yes, that’s today’s news, the universe keeps expanding and there are more galaxies that we thought. The universe seems a little less lonely today.