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Saturday, October 15th, 2016

The Universe Just Got 10 Times More Interesting

Author:     Marina Koren
Source:     The Atlantic
Publication Date:     13 October 2016 | 12:14 PM ET
 Link: The Universe Just Got 10 Times More Interesting
Stephan:   Another door opens to show us how vast, ancient, and complex the universe is. When you see this research, and you compare it to the little story told by Creationists -- the universe was created in six days, 6,000 years ago -- you can see how big the disconnect is between the Theocratic Rightist view of the world and the world of actual facts. Once your realize that these fundamentalists deny something as dramatic as this kind of research, you can understand how willful ignorance takes hold in a culture and can exercise a powerful dumbing down effect that is very dangerous.
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows thousands of galaxies whose light took billions of years to reach Earth. Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz (STScI)

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows thousands of galaxies whose light took billions of years to reach Earth.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz (STScI)

The earliest estimates of the number of galaxies in the Universe were very small. For centuries, astronomers thought there might be just one—our own. Most recent estimates built off observations from 1995, when NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope stared at a dark patch of sky for hours and returned a picture of thousands of glittering galaxies no one had ever seen before. Further measurements led astronomers to believe there are between 100 billion and 200 billion galaxies in the observable Universe that human-made technology can detect.

And that was the working estimate for the next two decades, until this week. Astronomers at the University of Nottingham now say the number of galaxies in the observable Universe is 2 trillion, more than 10 times as […]

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