Universe Has 2 Trillion Galaxies, Astronomers Say

[Fweethawt]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/13/hubble-telescope-universe-galaxies-astronomy

 

 

Hubble telescope images from deep space were collected over 20 years to solve the puzzle of how many galaxies the cosmos harbors.

 

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.

[Thought2Much]

That's like one galaxy for every cell in your body.

 

Depending upon how one counts what cells are yours, that is.

[older]

Two trillion galaxies. That's twice the number of stars in the Andromeda galaxy.

 

When I try to explain the size of all this to folks at our astronomy club outreach events when we set up scopes at the local shopping mall, I show them a container of Morton salt. I tell them to imagine using salt grains as stars in a scale model of the Milky Way, There are about 15 million grains of salt in one container. To have enough grains for all the stars in just our galaxy, you'd need 23,000 containers of salt. And then you'd have to spread out each grain about 7 miles from the next one. I always get a reaction to that. Then I tell them how many galaxies we think there are in the observable universe. Now I'll have a new number to throw at them. You just can't wrap your mind around such stuff.

 

Edit: I should credit the salt analogy to the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers.

[LogicalFallacy]

LOL I just wrote this on my website last night:

 

To comprehend just how vast the universe is, and therefore how insignificant this ‘special’ earth is, takes a lot of brain power. The universe is estimated to be 93 Billion light years across containing anywhere from 100 to 500 billion galaxies. Many of these are much much larger than ours. In the observable universe it is estimated that there are 1 billion trillion stars! In our galaxy alone astronomers estimate there are 100 billion habitable earth like planets. There are stars so huge they would consume half our solar system that collapse into blackholes from which even light cannot escape, or explode as supernovas spreading their guts across the galaxies.

 

I will have to majorly revise!! The numbers above are all based on 100-500 billion galaxies.... with 2 trillion..... mind boggling.

 

I found this article that hypothesis that earth is actually an early ,forming planet - we could be the only advanced species in the universe.... we could be THE eldar species. I actually feel a bit sad that we won't get to see what develops. (Disclaimer, not sure if this is peer reviewed yet, or just published. Probably the figures in it will need revising based on new info.

 

http://www.sciencealert.com/earth-was-one-of-the-first-habitable-planets-in-the-universe-and-most-are-yet-to-be-born-study-finds

 

Source Journal https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151020104849.htm 

[Fweethawt]

Link doesn't work. ^^^

[LogicalFallacy]

How weird.

 

Ok after much faffing around I found if I put it as a link (Not just copy paste) it works.

 

Please confirm. Also put the source journal there as well.

[Voice]

The link is all over facebook. NASA published it this week, and space.com, and others, they all published the same damned article.

 

What I don't get is why now? I'm not willing to believe that mass efforts of accomplished astronomers everywhere would count more poorly than me. Why now? None of these articles have said anything about why they think this - why a miscount.

 

How are we supposed to make universal calculations to decide the mass or age of the universe with all this miscounting going on? What already is the reason for this?

[Jedah]

This is why I largely agree with Stephen Hawking on the high likelihood of intelligent extraterrestrial life somewhere in the universe. We know the dice landed favorably once, and we know we can't estimate the size of the die due to only having one occurrence. But we do know how many tries we get to roll that die and it's higher than most cheap standard calculators will go.

[bornagainathiest]

The link is all over facebook. NASA published it this week, and space.com, and others, they all published the same damned article.

 

What I don't get is why now? I'm not willing to believe that mass efforts of accomplished astronomers everywhere would count more poorly than me. Why now? None of these articles have said anything about why they think this - why a miscount.

 

How are we supposed to make universal calculations to decide the mass or age of the universe with all this miscounting going on? What already is the reason for this?

 

Do you really want to know, Voice?

 

I ask because proper answers to your question are going to be quite complex, highly technical and involved - way beyond a humble amateur astronomer like me. 

 

I could use my (superficial and non-technical) understanding of these matters, to try and answer your questions... if that's ok by you.

 

Or, better still, you could ask Bhim.  http://www.ex-christian.net/user/20773-bhim/#.WAHQJvkrJD8

 

His chosen career path is galactic astrophysics, so population counts of stars and planets, distance estimates and the statistical analysis of galaxies are his 'thing'.

 

Thanks,

 

BAA.

 

 

 

 

p.s.

 

Please note that he's a very busy man and doesn't look in on Ex-C that often.  

 

A PM might be the best way to get his attention.

[Voice]

Bhim still doesn't think you can divide by zero. I respect his adherence to law. It's fun to try anyway though. Laws can be bent.

 

I found this. It's a step closer to answering my questions. I guess it took anyone this long to actually tally a number. I thought they were already tallying numbers.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2016/10/two-trillion-the-new-hubble-estimate-of-the-number-of-galaxies-in-the-universe.html#more

 

And yes, I want to know.

[Voice]

There are mega structures, comparable to brain cells in their distribution patterns. Laniakea is the local one.

 

The deep sky ones interest me most, the furthest.

 

Space.com posted this video

http://oak.ctx.ly/r/3idly

which raises a question:

Traditional understanding is that the further we look into deep space, the older the images we see, into the formation of the universe. This model, beautiful as it is, shows relatively even distributions of galaxies that all look the same to the very far. So are we looking at older galaxies that all look the same as our neighboring galaxies? Or is it their positions that reflect age?

[bornagainathiest]

Bhim still doesn't think you can divide by zero. I respect his adherence to law. It's fun to try anyway though. Laws can be bent.

 

I found this. It's a step closer to answering my questions. I guess it took anyone this long to actually tally a number. I thought they were already tallying numbers.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2016/10/two-trillion-the-new-hubble-estimate-of-the-number-of-galaxies-in-the-universe.html#more

 

And yes, I want to know.

 

Sorry Voice, but I can only respond to your questions within the parameters of unbent law.

[bornagainathiest]

Ok Voice, here's my stab at your question re counting/tallying the numbers of galaxies.

.

.

.

Personally, I see no problem with the way astronomers repeatedly revise their estimates of the numbers of a given population of astronomical objects.

If we take a look at the history of astronomical discoveries, we see an interesting pattern repeated over and over.  When someone trains a new and more powerful instrument on the skies, a previously unknown object will be detected.  Or sometimes, a small number of these objects will be seen.  Then, as surveys progress and more and more instruments of the same or better caliber join the search, the rate at which these objects are found accelerates.  Eventually, a large enough sample is gathered to begin to make statistical sense of the entire population.  This pattern of lone discovery, followed by a trickle similar findings and then a flood of discoveries - leading to classification of various types has been seen many times in history.  Here are some examples. 

 

Asteroids were initially found in ones and twos in the early 1800's.  

At that time nothing was known about the different types, different compositions and different orbital characteristics of these objects.  Classifying them and understanding them better had to wait until a sufficiently large statistical sample was available.  Two centuries later, we now know that they number in their millions.  As new instruments come on line, the rate at which we discover them accelerates.  As we can see here...  http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/

 

The same story more-or-less played out when it came to Kuiper Belt Objects.

At first, one or two were found every so often, but with dedicated searches and with better and better scopes, that rate has increased greatly.  Naturally enough, the largest and brightest KBO's were the ones to be discovered first.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_brightest_Kuiper_belt_objects  I'm confident that the same pattern of gradual and then rapid discovery will happen when we acquire the technology to detect Oort Cloud objects.

 

Moving outwards, the rate at which exoplanets were discovered followed a similar pattern.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/exoplanet-discovery-rate-goes-from-a-trickle-to-a-flood/

 

And the number of those hard-to-detect brown dwarves is beginning to increase too.

https://news.virginia.edu/content/uva-astronomers-find-oasis-brown-dwarf-desert

 

As you probably know, prior to Edwin Hubble's discovery of Cepheid variables in M31 (the Andromeda galaxy), nobody knew for certain if the entire universe consisted of anything more then the Milky Way galaxy.  So it was his use of a new instrument, the 100 inch Hooker telescope at Mt. Wilson observatory, that lead to a new class of object being discovered - entire galaxies like our own, but lying millions of light years away.  

 

Neutrino astronomy is in it's early days, but even with the instruments we do have, we've detected a burst of neutrinos from Supernova 1987a and we've made inroads into understanding the weird oscillation that these particles undergo, flipping flavors between tau,muon and electron.  The IceCube detector at the South Pole is bringing in new data, even as we speak. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory

 

Recently the LIGO facilities have detected two Stellar-class black hole merging events and when more such devices come on line, no doubt the rate of discovery will accelerate.

Also, other types of gravitational disturbance, currently only theorized, will most likely be detected too.  Supermassive black hole mergers, Neutron star mergers and Supernova core-collapse events 

 

Historically, it's the same story, over and over again, Voice.

A new instrument or a new wavelength of observation or some new technique reveals a new class of previously unknown object, first in small numbers and then in a flood.  After that, when there's enough data, scientists gain a better understanding of what these things are.  Part and parcel of that processing is counting and tallying and to quote a popular song... the only way is up!  So, in summing up, I have to say that I'm not at all surprised to see such a large upward revision of galaxies numbers in the universe.  In fact I'd be rather surprised if the pattern I've described in the post didn't play out again.

 

Thanks,

 

BAA.