There are ten times more galaxies in the universe than scientists thought

Scientists have made some errors in their past census of exactly how many galaxies lurked in the universe and it was a big one. According to a new census that has been made that is more accurate than past counts, the universe has ten times more galaxies than scientists previously estimated. That adds up to over a trillion galaxies in the universe.

The new census came from deep-space images and other data that the Hubble Space Telescope has collected. That data and the images were used to create a 3D map of the known universe containing as many as 200 billion galaxies. The scientists on the project relied on the Deep Field images that Hubble snaps and used new mathematical models to calculate where other galaxies might exist that the telescope hasn't yet snapped images of.

The reason these galaxies haven't been seen before is because they are too far away to too dim for modern telescopes to see them. "It boggles the mind that over 90 percent of the galaxies in the universe have yet to be studied," Christopher Conselice, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham in the U.K., who led the study, said in a statement. "Who knows what interesting properties we will find when we observe these galaxies with the next generation of telescopes."

One of the most interesting parts about looking at out into space and discovering these very distant and dim galaxies is that we are essentially looking back in time because the light takes so long to reach the Earth and our telescopes. This study had the researchers looking at universes that are up to 13 billion light-years away. Looking at these distant galaxies allowed the scientists to study what the universe was like only 100 million years after the Big Bang or 13 billion years ago.

During the research the team found that the early universe contained more galaxies than it does today and that many of those distant galaxies are dwarf galaxies that are small and very faint. Conselice said, "[The study results are] very surprising as we know that, over the 13.7 billion years of cosmic evolution since the Big Bang, galaxies have been growing through star formation and mergers with other galaxies. Finding more galaxies in the past implies that significant evolution must have occurred to reduce their number through extensive merging of systems."

SOURCE: space.com