Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Billions of Galaxies Billions of Years Ago

Thousands of galaxies crowd into this Herschel image of the distant universe. Each dot is an entire galaxy containing billions of stars. This image image was taken in a region of space called the Lockman hole, which allows a clear line of sight out into the distant Universe. This "hole" is located in the familiar northern constellation of Ursa Major, The Great Bear. Credit: ESA & SPIRE Consortium & HerMES consortia

From this Space.com article.

4 comments:

Steven Colyer said...

How many jellybeans are in the jar?

I'm sure there's more than thousands of galaxies there, and OK billions is a stretch, but ...

Anyone care to count or estimate the number of galaxies in that photo?

Andrew Thomas said...

I counted 129. Could be more.

Steven Colyer said...

I think you meant 129,000, right?

Btw, if you look at the left half of that photo, can you see what appears a dachshund in profile looking to the right?

I'm not going crazy, I'm no conspiracy nut, I'm just saying. It's better defined that the "SH" on the COBE CMB map, anyway. SH= Stephen Hawking, or Sabine Hossenfelder? You make the call.

Steven Colyer said...

I guess about 100 galaxies in a 2mm x 2mm square, x 16 across times 16 top to bottom, for a total of ... carry the one ... 25,600. Hmm.

Wow, I thought there'd be more than that. Hmm. They must be hiding behind the ones we see. Maybe.

Well, whatever, that's a very small sample of the sky. Anyone have the ratio of that patch to the whole sky?