do you Believe that the universe was between 100 billion and 200 billion galaxies? The answer would be closer to one or two billions of galaxies, although perhaps more.
That indicates the most recent census, reported Thursday.
A professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham, in England, led an international team that gave the surprising estimate of 2 billion galaxies throughout the universe. Professor Christopher Conselice pointed out that this represents a minimum of 10 times longer.
Conselice said he was surprised with the results. He said that he hoped to double or tripled the number of galaxies, but “10 is too much,” and you may find that there are many more.
The scientists based their count of galaxies in observations that had already been made by the Hubble Space Telescope and observatories on earth. Converted those images to 3-D and used new mathematical models for the update.
“Surprising that more than 90% of the galaxies in the universe are studied,” said Conselice in a press release. “Who knows what interesting properties we find when we find these galaxies with the next generation of telescopes?”
Even scientists have problems to assimilate such large numbers. According to Conselice, two trillion is almost equivalent to the number of seconds in a thousand lives average.
The findings were reported in the Astrophysical Journal.
EUROPEAN SATELLITE PUTS you ON THE MAP MORE THAN a THOUSAND MILLION STARS
last September 14, it was revealed that a european satellite located the positions and brightness of a thousand 140 million stars, which would allow you to create a three-dimensional map accurate as of the Milky Way and to better understand the evolution of the galaxy.
In the first 14 months of his five-year mission, Gaia also determined the distances and movements in the sky of two million stars, said the European Space Agency (ESA, for its acronym in English) on Wednesday to present the first set of data obtained by Gaia.
The ESA launched the satellite Gaia in December of 2013 to record the position, colour and brightness of about a thousand million stars, putting it in orbit around the Sun some 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth.
Equipped with two telescopes with mirrors of various shapes and sizes, the satellite of two tons can see a hundred times further and to measure the position and movement of the stars, 200 times more accurately than Hipparcos, the first space mission to measure positions of stars, the that operated from 1989 until 1993.
“Gaia is in the forefront of the astrometry, by drawing the sky with an accuracy that has never before been achieved,” said Alvaro Giménez, director of science at ESA, in a statement.
The scientists hope that the study of the stars allows them to look at the past, up until the moment that the galaxy was beginning to be formed, and that Gaia will discover new planets and asteroids, as well as distant supernovae and quasars, the hot and bright cores of galaxies.
it Is expected that Gaia -designed and built by Astrium, which is now part of Airbus – collects sufficient data in five years to fill over 1.5 million CD ROMs. The data are freely available to the astronomical community.
The u.s. space agency NASA has worked with similar programs. Planning a mission of observation of two years, called TESS, which will use cameras wide field to be able to detect planets since some of the size of the Earth up to gas giants.
Another mission to search for possible habitable planets, called SIM, was postponed.
With information from Excelsior
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