In three hours, you can read up to 100 pages, or you can find 49 new galaxies.
Back in 2016, thanks to a deep-sky census assembled from surveys taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories, astronomers concluded that there are at least 10 times more galaxies in the observable universe than previously thought to be the case.
How many galaxies are there in the universe?
Thanks to very deep Hubble Space Telescope images, it was approximated that the observable Universe contains about 100 billion galaxies in total, but, according to a study from 2016 led by Christopher Conselice, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Nottingham, the actual number is much higher.
The team discovered that the number of galaxies in our universe is at least two trillion, ten times more than previously thought, with the often quoted value of around 100 Billion.
Professor Conselice said back then: “We are missing the vast majority of galaxies because they are very faint and far away. The number of galaxies in the universe is a fundamental number we would like to know, and it boggles the mind that over 90% of the galaxies in the universe have yet to be studied.”
How crowded is the universe?
“Stars are born from huge clouds of mostly hydrogen gas floating in space. Astronomers like me study this gas because it helps us understand how stars and galaxies form and grow,” wrote Dr. Marcin Glowacki, the author of a new study that presented us with 49 new inhabitants of space.
“Recently, my colleagues and I were using a telescope like this a radio telescope called MeerKAT, in South Africa to look for hydrogen gas in a particular galaxy…When we looked at the results, we were in for a huge surprise.”
Well, in less than three hours, an international team of astronomers discovered 49 new gas-rich galaxies using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. The observations lasted less than three hours and were made possible by IDIA (Inter-University Institute of Data Intensive Astronomy).
Professor Ed Elson, from the University of the Western Cape and a co-author of the paper, said that this discovery highlights the raw power of the MeerKAT telescope as an imaging instrument.
“The methods we developed and implemented to study the 49ers will be useful for MeerKAT large science surveys and smaller observing campaigns such as ours,” he said.
The 49ers
The goal of this study was to research the star-forming gas in a single radio galaxy, but the team didn’t find any star-forming gas in the galaxy, however, they found 49 for happiness because while inspecting the data, they discovered other galaxies…or in other words, the gas of 49 galaxies was detected.
Dr. Marcin Glowacki, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Western Australia, led the research. He said this was a great example of how fantastic an instrument like MeerKAT is for finding the star-forming gas in galaxies.
“I did not expect to find almost fifty new galaxies in such a short time. By implementing different techniques for finding galaxies, which are used for other MeerKAT surveys, we were able to detect all of these galaxies and reveal their gas content,” he says in the statement.
Gold nuggets in our night sky
Dr Glowacki sees the 49 new galaxies as valuable as gold nuggets in our night sky. Many galaxies are near each other, forming galaxy groups, with several identified in one observation. For example, three galaxies are directly connected by their gas.
According to him, these three are particularly interesting, as by studying the galaxies at other wavelengths of light, they discovered the central galaxy is forming many stars.
“It is likely stealing the gas from its companion galaxies to fuel its star formation, which may lead the other two to become inactive,” he adds.
What they will find next, they do not know, but as he concluded with MeerKAT and eventually its more powerful successor, the SKA telescope, they are confident astronomers will turn up plenty more pieces of gold.
