NASA’s intelligent telescope revealed to astronomers that there exist about two trillions of galaxies in the universe. Doesn’t this make you feel very small? This new number assumed by Hubble is significantly higher than astronomers had previously considered. The recent study which will soon appear in the Astrophysical Journal had determined researchers to look again at the evolution of the universe’s structure, this time taking into consideration the nature of black matter.
- With the help of Hubble’s telescope, astronomers managed to look back in time.
- They have discovered that the universe contains ten times more galaxies than thought.
Christopher Conselice, who is the lead author of the study but also an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham, argued that he and his team were glad to discover that the number of galaxies is ten times bigger than everybody previously thought it for the last twenty years. The more information we learn about the universe, the more we see its immensity.
The universe works on certain principles, a planet being circled by stars and those stars hover in a certain galaxy. All galaxies seem to be traveling in clusters which indicate to be grouped together by an infinity of dark matter. A galaxy is a unit of that group. Thus, to understand the universe, scientists need to reveal which is the populations of galaxies that exist within it.
Experts have tried to look back at how the world displayed itself in time. As far as we know, the sun’s light travels to Earth in eight minutes, meaning that what we see now was the image of the sun from eight minutes ago. Astronomers have followed the same pattern to determine a bigger picture of the universe. If it were to take a look at a galaxy which is situated at about three billion light-years away, we would actually see the picture of the galaxy as it appeared three billion years back.
Twenty years ago, Hubble managed to capture the most distant images, unveiling how the universe looked about ten billion years ago. Astronomers tried to generalize this idea and analyzed all the galaxies, reaching the theory that during its evolution the world must have clustered together about one hundred billion galaxies. This is an outstanding number.
Even if Hubble used all its resources to capture those images, they had a limit. The telescope used optical light to decide how far back in space, and thus time, astronomers were able to look. If they had a more advanced technology using wavelengths of infrared light, they would have obtained even more detailed results.
Image courtesy of: pixabay
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