Phil Plait. A new paper just published in the prestigious Astrophysical Journal makes a stunning claim: There are 10 times as many galaxies in the Universe as we previously thought. At least. The total number comes in at about 2 trillion of them. Now, let me be clear. This doesn’t meant the Universe is 10 times bigger than we thought, or there are 10 times as many stars. I’ll explain—I mean, duh, it’s what I do—but to cut to the chase, what they found is that there are lots of teeny, faint galaxies very far away that have gone undetected. What the astronomers did was look at extremely deep images of the Universe taken in surveys, for example the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. That’s a lot of galaxies.
Surveys like the UDF are limited. The astronomers who did this research had an interesting problem. The answer is two-fold. Those numbers change with distance. At the same time, these faint galaxies are easier to see close to us, and harder farther away. NASA,ESA, H. As the authors themselves say: David Attenborough. Brian Cox. Carl Sagan. Dr. Michio Kaku. Bill Nye. Neil Degrasse Tyson.