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How Many Galaxies Are in the Universe? A New Answer From the Darkest Sky Ever Observed
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Ordinarily, we point telescopes at some object we want to see in greater detail. In the 1990s astronomers did the opposite. They pointed the most powerful telescope in history, the Hubble Space Telescope, at a dark patch of sky devoid of known stars, gas, or galaxies. But in that sliver of nothingness, Hubble revealed a breathtaking sight: The void was brimming with galaxies.
Astronomers have long wondered how many galaxies there are in the universe, but until Hubble, the galaxies we could observe were far outnumbered by fainter galaxies hidden by distance and time. The Hubble Deep Field series (scientists made two more such observations) offered a kind of core sample of the universe going back nearly to the Big Bang. This allowed astronomers to finally estimate the galactic population to be
A mission from NASA has discovered there may be a lot fewer galaxies than initially believed, opening up the possibility humanity is alone in the universe.
As one of the authors of the new study has explained, the focus of their attention, the so called cosmic optical background, essentially “puts a constraint on the total.