“THE LEGACY OF HUBBLE: ONE IMAGE, A QUARTER MILLION GALAXIES”

Astronomy has to be the sexiest science. Everything you produce elicits “oohs” and “aahs.” This image is so impressive that I downloaded the full-size version, just to stand back in awe. It portrays a quarter of a million galaxies, some of them seen by us as they were near the beginning of time as we know it.

And it represents only a tiny fraction of the full panorama of the universe. It takes up only about as much of the sky as a full moon. When astronomers do the math, they end up with an estimate of 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the universe, but that estimate is based on our limited technology for observation. Astrophysicists speculate that the true number is probably something like two trillion.

How many stars are in that universe? It’s difficult to say because we don’t have a good handle on the average number of stars per galaxy, for many reasons, not the least of which is that even when we know that specific galaxies exist, we see them in the past, at different stages of star formation. We can estimate that if the Milky Way is as average a galaxy as it is a candy bar, then there may be between a sextillion and a septillion stars, but that is little more than a guess. Let’s just say the number must have a shitload of commas in it.

One thought on ““THE LEGACY OF HUBBLE: ONE IMAGE, A QUARTER MILLION GALAXIES”

  1. I wish there were more comments on something wonderful like this than on something awful like Trump. Yet I have nothing meaningful to say about this other than it is too fantastic for me to grasp. Whereas even my tiny mind can grasp Trump and his crowd.

Comments are closed.