The largest map of the universe reveals over 800k galaxies | Hacker News Reader

The largest map of the universe reveals over 800k galaxies

newatlas.com

15 pointsthunderbong10 comments

Just imagining the number of unique worlds these 800k galaxies contain really blows my mind. Especially when there are probably a lot more to be discovered.

And consider these are 800k galaxies mapped in the subtending angle of three moons in the sky...

If Claude is correct, these 0.54 square degrees represent 0.0013% of the full 41,253 square degrees of the sky (4*pi steradians).

I checked the math and it is correct! So assuming this is a representative sample, there would be 800000/0.000013 ~= 61 billion galaxies in the celestial sphere.

According to Wikipedia, "It is estimated that there are between 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe."

Edited: Off by some orders of magnitude.

The unimaginable vastness of the universe is so humbling. I love the effort of science teams to make their work accessible to the public too.

EDIT: one of the galaxies in the article highlight photos (the top right one) sure has a structure that just feels "artificial" to me.

One thing that fascinates me about science fiction is how uniformly it tends to restrict itself to our galaxy. FTL? I have friends who think that's coming this century. Colonization on Mars? Probably only a little harder than those moonbases I saw on 1970's TV shows.

But when Star Trek made a whole series about a ship being sent too far away to ever return (in one lifetime), they only sent it to the other side of our galaxy.

Anyway... the Fermi Paradox still doesn't apply to things 100s of MLYs away, that we can barely size up, much less get TV channel programming from.

Huh, I thought there would be more. Like billions of galaxies.

They only observed an area of sky approximately the size of "three full moons"

> By using the data from the James Webb Space Telescope’s 6.5‑meter (21-ft) mirror, scientists at UC Santa Barbara have surveyed 0.54 square degrees of sky, which is equivalent to the area of three full moons when viewed from Earth. Charting nearly 800,000 galaxies, the COSMOS-Web dataset covers almost 98% of cosmic history.

There are. The count is gotten by extrapolating from randomly selected areas of sky. This is more like another detailed picture of a small patch of sky.

Interactive images can be found here

https://cosmos2025.iap.fr/fitsmap/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com