• Question: how many galaxies are there

    Asked by daanyaal to Stephen, Phil, Hannah, Lucy on 10 Mar 2017. This question was also asked by DJSAmelia.
    • Photo: Phil Sutton

      Phil Sutton answered on 10 Mar 2017:

      We originally estimated about 100 billion galaxies from observations done with Hubble space telescope. However more recent work suggests there are now 2 trillion galaxies! The thing is we can only estimate these numbers from what we can see. Now if you consider that when we look at distant objects we are looking back in time. We can only see so far, there might be lots more we can’t see yet.

      Some other numbers though. Each of those galaxies is going to have a few hundred billion stars. Each star will have more than one star. That’s a lot of planets out there. With those sorts of numbers the possibility of life somewhere is very high.

    • Photo: Lucy Kissick

      Lucy Kissick answered on 14 Mar 2017:

      The Hubble space telescope estimates there are 100 billion galaxies out there, but once we get a bigger telescope up there (the James Webb Telescope, which launches this year) we’ll probably have to up that estimate!!

    • Photo: Hannah Sargeant

      Hannah Sargeant answered on 15 Mar 2017:

      I can’t add any more to these great answers, hopefully you’ve got everything you wanted to know and more!

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