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It's pretty incredible to think that we're at a point in human history where we can map 450 million galaxies and probe the origins of the universe
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Survey has recorded more than one billion galaxies. But there are many more galaxies in the observable universe … somewhere between 2 and 20 trillion
It's pretty incredible to think that we're at a point in human history where we can map 450 million galaxies and probe the origins of the universe
And to think I assumed Astronomy was a stagnant field some decades ago. I have no idea why I thought that. Maybe that optical resolution from ground-based telescopes was not going to advance orders of magnitudes? Maybe I didn't think the sciences would continue to get money for space telescopes?
It's pretty incredible to think that we're at a point in human history where we can map 450 million galaxies and probe the origins of the universe
I feel infinitesimally small.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are more recent estimates going from 6-20 trillion now: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/galaxies-in-universe...
That article is going beyond the observable universe, other comments were talking about within it.
> "Instead, based on what we see around nearby Milky Way analogues, there ought to be at least 6 trillion galaxies contained within the observable Universe, and it’s plausible that a number that’s more like ~20 trillion"