For the last 25 years , the Hubble Space Telescope has allow us to look late into the macrocosm , helping us resolve some long - standing mystery – such as the prevalence of mordant holes – whilst raising more questions about others . It also simply allowed us to see more of what ’s out there , fanning theories of thousands of far away galaxies too dim to properly make out . Butnew researchindicates that we might have been overrate this .
“ Our work suggests that there are far fewer weak galaxies than we once antecedently thought , ” explained Brian O’Shea , who co - authored thestudypublished inAstrophysical Journal Letters . “ earliest estimation set the number of faint galaxies in the early world to be one C or thousands of times larger than the few bright galaxy that we can actually see with the Hubble Space Telescope . We now retrieve that bit could be closer to ten times larger . ”
How bright a galaxy appears reckon on a number of constituent , include its distance from us and the number of stars present in the cluster . We have a pretty good idea of how many bright , easy honor Galax urceolata there are , but it ’s far intemperate to calculate the number of dimmer ace that are , by their very nature , trickier to observe .
The team of researchers fromMichigan State Universityran a computer simulation of galaxies form during the commencement of the universe , factor in in M of clusters and how their single gravities and radiation interact . They found that the pretending pretty accurately portend the number of bright beetleweed , the ones we have managed to observe , but what they did n’t find was an exponentially increasing number of faint ones .
This suggests that it ’s likely wrong that there are a thousand times more faint galaxy compared to bright unity , and that the number is perhaps a more low 10 to 100 time greater . The research worker hope that when theJames Webb Space Telescopecomes online , it will permit astronomers the fortune to have a far more detailed look into space , and that the data it gather will add more to the public debate .
