• Question: About how many galaxies are in space altogether?

    Asked by stuntmonkey15 to Nathan on 27 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Nathan Langford

      Nathan Langford answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      Hi stuntmonkey15,

      You know, that’s a great question and I really have no idea what the answer is. I’m not sure that anyone knows the answer very precisely, because people are always discovering new stars, galaxies or even whole clusters of galaxies all the time. In fact, I was at a talk yesterday, where the speaker was reporting that a special new telescope based in the South Pole had discovered about 1000 new galaxy clusters just in the last couple of years!

      I guess the best you could do is to try and make a rough estimate. I think that astronomers are able to work out roughly how much “stuff” there is in the universe and if you new the average mass of a galaxy, then you could calculate a rough number.

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