How many Galaxies are in this Universe currently?

Question

These galaxies that scientists view from billions of light years away may not even exist anymore (because of collisions and stuff). Yet, they are still counted as galaxies existing today. Can the estimates of 100 billion galaxies be acurate, or be wildly wrong?

Answer 1

i think it's closer to 200 billion, and no those estimates aren't accurate.... becuase that's only counting what we can see....

the combination of more years for light to travel from further reaches, and more powerful telescopes has shown us our universe is much much bigger then originally thought... and it's very likely we'll only find it just gets bigger and bigger....

Answer 2

There are probably more than 100 billion (10^11) galaxies in the observable universe

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxies

Answer 3

scientists discover more and more each day, so it's not exactly clear how many galaxies there are currently.

Answer 4

As tsr21 noted above me the estimate is 100 billion galaxies in the *observable* universe.  It is quite possible there are more outside of that range.

If you want some sense of it see the link below which tells of the Hubble Telescope's deep field picture.  It took a snapshot of the sky that is "only about the width of a dime 75 feet away".  In that photo there were 1500+ galaxies.

Now imagine you are in space and need to take a picture at a time that covered the entire area of space.  Think about it...you at the center of a gigantor sphere and you need to photograph the whole interior surface a teeny speck at a time each of which contains 1500 or more galaxies.    

Heck, go outside and look at the sky and imagine taking a picture of each speck till you covered the whole thing...and then remember you missed more than half of it (whole other side of the earth for one thing).

EDIT:  Re-reading your question I realized it has not been answered.

You are right when we look into deep space we are seeing things that may not be there.  For instance we see Quasars in deep space but there are none near us.  

The answer is we are looking back in time when we look into space.  When you stand outside and look at the stars you are seeing them as they were many years ago.  If a star 10 light years away exploded 2 years ago you would not know it for another 8 years.

This gets a little weird bet bear with me.

If you magicked yourself to where we see a quasar today it would not be there.  However, if you looked back towards earth in the sky you would see quasars in the vicinity of the earth.

The answer to that is quasars were a feature of the early universe and are now gone.  Looking back to earth from your vantage point some several billion light years away you would be seeing the past when there were some in the neighborhood.  The earth, to you, would now be at the edge of the universe (indeed looking back the earth would not have been formed yet).

In short, no matter where you are in the universe, you can consider yourself as at the center.  There is no real "center" of it all but it still works like that from *your* perspective.

Assuming I could teleport you anywhere in the Universe the rest of the Universe would look pretty much the same in all directions.  No matter where you are.

Answer 5

it is infinite for all we know.

Answer 6

As far as we are concerned, we can't really give a rough estimate for the number of galaxies out there.  As far as our technology goes, we can't even be certain that there aren't any more galaxies further than what we can see.

It's interesting because scientists say that some of the galaxies that exist/existing/existed, are so big that it is impossible for them to exist, shows us how our theory needs some revising.

I just see no definite answers unless they are willing to count every grain of sand.

Answer 7

Let's consider the issue by looking at a picture of the sky taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. This telescope is the most capable of existing telescopes for viewing very faint objects. In an effort to observe the faintest galaxies,and their numbers, astronomers decided to spend 10 entire days training this telescope on one small region of the sky to observe the faintest galaxies and learn about them. But nevertheless they did find no accurate number of galaxies. therefore those 100 billion galaxies are absolutely wildly wrong wrong . In such small region of the sky they were unable to find the exact number of galaxies, let alone whole universe.

use this link for your query(http://astronomy.nmsu.edu/astro/a110labs...

Answer 8

i think 100,000+ :D

woo