How many galaxies are there in the observable universe? Not as many as we thought, according to a new study. NASA’s New Horizons probe has measured the blackness of the sky and found that there’s probably “only” a few hundred billion galaxies glowing too faintly for us to detect, much fewer than previous estimates.
To get a really good look at the stars in the night sky, you need to drive out of the city, away from light pollution. And the same thing applies to spacecraft – the inner solar system is full of drifting specks of dust that catch the sunlight, so the probes that make it to the outskirts have a clearer view of the faintest light in the universe.
As one of the most distant human-made objects out there, New Horizons is perfect for the job. After flying by Pluto in 2015 and the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth in 2019, the craft is now more than 4 billion miles (6.4 billion km) from Earth. At that distance, the ambient sky is 10 times darker than what Hubble deals with.
So a team of astronomers used it to examine the cosmic optical background, the diffuse visible light that glows so faintly that most telescopes on or in orbit around Earth can’t really see it behind local light pollution.
“While the cosmic microwave background tells us about the first 450,000 years after the Big Bang, the cosmic optical background tells us something about the sum total of all the stars that have ever formed since then,” says Marc Postman, lead author of the study. “It puts a constraint on the total number of galaxies that have been created, and where they might be in time.”
According to the new study, there are probably a few hundred billion unseen galaxies lurking in the darkness. That sounds like a lot, but it’s far fewer than the previous estimates of two trillion or so that were extrapolated from Hubble data.
“Take all the galaxies Hubble can see, double that number, and that’s what we see – but nothing more,” says Tod Lauer, lead author on the study.
To reach this conclusion, the team analyzed images from New Horizons archives, correcting for things like light from Milky Way stars reflecting off interstellar dust. That left an extremely faint but still measurable background glow.
So where is that leftover light coming from? The astronomers suggest that it could be from very diffuse dwarf galaxies relatively nearby, or far more faint galaxies at further distances. Rogue stars untethered to galaxies could also be the culprit, or perhaps galaxy haloes are brighter than we give them credit for.
Future observations, such as the James Webb Telescope set to launch in October, could help answer these questions.
The research has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
Source: Hubble
