20 Times More Galaxies Than Previously Thought

[mosaix]

Universe has 2 trillion galaxies, astronomers say

There are a dizzying 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, up to 20 times more than previously thought, astronomers reported on Thursday. The surprising finding, based on 3D modeling of images collected over 20 years by the Hubble Space Telescope, was published in the Astronomical Journal.

The numbers are just mind boggling.

 

[J Riff]

Wait, we missed a couple billion... *

 

[HanaBi]

The problem with talking about numbers in the context of Space and cosmology, is how utterly insignificant numbers really are!

Two trillion is indeed a huge number; but then in cosmology scientists talk about Googolplex, which is :-

"... is the number 10googol, or equivalently, 1010100. Written out in ordinary decimal notation, it is 1 followed by 10100 zeroes, that is, a 1 followed by a googol of zeroes."

or as Carl Sagan pointed out....

"In the PBS science program Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Episode 9: "The Lives of the Stars", astronomer and television personality Carl Sagan estimated that writing a googolplex in full decimal form (i.e., "10,000,000,000...") would be physically impossible, since doing so would require more space than is available in the known universe.

Writing the number would take an extreme amount of time: if a person can write two digits per second, then writing a googolplex would take around about 1.51×1092 years, which is about 1.1×1082 times the accepted age of the universe."

But even a Googolplex is insignificant compared to infinity - assuming Space is still expanding!

So 2 trillion is neither here nor there in the great scheme of things. Although it is good that the Hubble telescope managed to map so many galaxies; and hopefully the next generation of space telescopes will reveal even more secrets of space.