{"id":141004,"date":"2022-06-23T08:02:34","date_gmt":"2022-06-23T13:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/there-are-more-galaxies-in-the-universe-than-even-carl-sagan-ever-imagined"},"modified":"2022-06-23T08:02:34","modified_gmt":"2022-06-23T13:02:34","slug":"there-are-more-galaxies-in-the-universe-than-even-carl-sagan-ever-imagined","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/there-are-more-galaxies-in-the-universe-than-even-carl-sagan-ever-imagined","title":{"rendered":"There are more galaxies in the Universe than even Carl Sagan ever imagined"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

The Universe is a vast place, filled with more galaxies than we\u2019ve ever been able to count, even in just the portion we\u2019ve been able to observe. Some 40 years ago, Carl Sagan taught the world that there were hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way alone, and perhaps as many as 100 billion galaxies within the observable Universe. Although he never said it in his famous television series, Cosmos, the phrase \u201cbillions and billions<\/a>\u201d has become synonymous with his name, and also with the number of stars we think of as being inherent to each galaxy, as well as the number of galaxies contained within the visible Universe.<\/p>\n

But when it comes to the number of galaxies that are actually out there, we\u2019ve learned a number of important facts that have led us to revise that number upwards, and not just by a little bit. Our most detailed observations of the distant Universe, from the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field<\/a>, gave us an estimate of 170 billion galaxies. A theoretical calculation from a few years ago \u2014 the first to account for galaxies too small, faint, and distant to be seen \u2014 put the estimate far higher: at 2 trillion. But even that estimate is too low. There ought to be at least 6 trillion, and perhaps more like 20 trillion, galaxies, if we\u2019re ever able to count them all. Here\u2019s how we got there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Universe is a vast place, filled with more galaxies than we\u2019ve ever been able to count, even in just the portion we\u2019ve been able to observe. Some 40 years ago, Carl Sagan taught the world that there were hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way alone, and perhaps as many as 100 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}