/sci/ - Science & Math

Redpill me on him

There are more galaxies in the Universe than even Carl Sagan ever imagined

Forget billions and billions. When it comes to the number of galaxies in the Universe, both theorists' and observers' estimates are too low.

If you take the deepest image ever created of the distant Universe, the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, and extrapolate over the whole sky, you'd estimate there were ~170 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. A detailed theoretical simulation predicted far more faint, small galaxies than we've seen, upping the expected total to closer to 2 trillion. But recent observational evidence shows that even that estimate is far too low. Instead, there are between 6 and 20 trillion galaxies out there. Carl Sagan's "billions and billions" was far too low of a guess.