This huge, multiframe panorama was taken in October 2014 at the Canyon de Chile National Monument in northeastern Arizona. The light of the zodiac is on the left, with the northern galaxy on the right.
Z Lev
When we think of space as a vast ocean of blackness, we see at night that it is interrupted by countless stars, galaxies, and even some. Planets visible to the naked eye.
Scientists recently used data from NASA’s New Horizons mission in a dimension beyond Pluto to see how dark the cosmic background really is. The full impact of what they discovered has an impact on what we know about the creation of the universe.
In short, the space is so dark that there may not be many galaxies that will add their glowing glow to their backdrop, which astronomers have previously speculated.
“That’s an important number to know – how many constellations are there?” Mark Postman of the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement on Tuesday. “We just can’t see the light of 2 trillion galaxies.”
This earlier estimate was taken from the Hubble Space Telescope observations, but a new study coming out in the Astrophysical Journal and co-authored by Postman suggests that the total number of galaxies in the universe is probably in the hundreds of billions instead of trillions.
Interestingly, this is close to the previous figure which is estimating that there are about 200 billion galaxies. It was based on Hubble data from the 1990s.
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The location of the New Horizon, near the edge of the solar system, gives it an atmosphere 10 times darker than Hubble sits.
“Such criteria are very difficult. A lot of people have tried this for a long time,” said Todd Lau Are, author of the study at the National Optical Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory. “New horizons have given us a decent place to measure the cosmic optical background better than anyone could have done.”
The team’s results will be presented Wednesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Next James Webb Web Space Telescope, Currently set to launch on Halloween, can provide a greater understanding of exactly how many and what types of galaxies offer a pagan glow that prevents the universe from going completely black.
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