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This very wide and multiframe panorama was taken in October 2014 at Canyon de Chelly National Monument in northeastern Arizona. The zodiacal light is on the left, with the northern Milky Way on the right.
Z. Levay
While we might think of space as a vast sea of darkness, all we have to do is look up at night to see that it is punctuated by countless stars, galaxies, and even a few. planets visible to the naked eye.
Scientists recently used data from NASA’s New Horizons mission beyond Pluto to measure how dark the cosmic background really is. What they discovered has implications for what we thought we knew about the makeup of the entire universe.
In short, space is so dark that there cannot be as many galaxies adding their faint glow to the background as astronomers previously estimated.
“That’s an important number to know – how many galaxies are there?” Marc Postman of the Space Telescope Scientific Institute said in a statement Tuesday. “We just don’t see the light of 2 trillion galaxies.”
This was the earlier estimate derived from observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, but a new study forthcoming in the Astrophysical Journal and co-authored by Postman suggests that the total number of galaxies in the universe is likely to be in the hundreds of billions. rather than billions.
Interestingly, this is closer to an even older figure assuming there were around 200 billion galaxies. This was based on Hubble data from the 1990s.
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New Horizons’ location near the edge of the solar system gives it an ambient sky 10 times darker than the one where Hubble is located.
“These types of measurements are extremely difficult. A lot of people have tried to do this for a long time,” said study co-author Tod Lauer of the National Laboratory for Infrared Optical Astronomy Research. “New Horizons has provided us with a vantage point to measure the cosmic optical background better than anyone has been able to.”
The team’s results will be presented Wednesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
The next James Webb Space Telescope, which is currently slated to launch for Halloween, could help provide additional information on the number and type of galaxies that provide the faint backdrop that keeps the universe from going totally black.
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