Scientists now believe we have underestimated the number of observable galaxies by a factor of 10. That's right, instead of 200 billion galaxies it is more like 2 trillion. That also means a heck of a lot more planets and places for life.
A team lead by Christopher Conselice of the University of Nottingham, U.K., looked at one small patch of sky and discovered 10 times more galaxies than ever expected. His team used data taken from the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories. This sampling appears to be similar to the Kepler approach when it too viewed a patch of sky to project the sample of discovered exoplanets to entire night sky. You can read the team's paper here.
Conselice noted:
It boggles the mind that over 90 percent of the galaxies in the universe have yet to be studied. Who knows what interesting properties we will find when we discover these galaxies with future generations of telescopes? In the near future, the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to study these ultra-faint galaxies,
The quote in the title of this piece comes from the HubbleSite, which notes:
As is often the case, reality mimics science fiction and then runs with it far beyond what we imagined.In Arthur C. Clarke's novel "2001: A Space Odyssey," astronaut David Bowman exclaims, "My God, it's full of stars!" before he gets pulled into an alien-built wormhole in space. When the Hubble Space Telescope made its deepest views of the universe, astronomers might have well exclaimed: "My God, it's full of galaxies!"
