Week in Geek - Crowded House
This Hubble Space Telescope view reveals thousands of galaxies stretching back into time across billions of light-years of space. Credit: NASA, ESA, the GOODS Team, and M. Giavialisco (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
My weekly post for The Rachel Maddow Show.
Week in Geek: Crowded House edition
Did you notice anything different last week? Did things feel more crowed than usual? They should have, because Universe just got a lot denser.
Okay so maybe not exactly, but the estimated density of galaxies in the Universe did change, thanks to some intrepid astronomers at the University of Nottingham in England. Up until last week, the party line in astronomy was that there were roughly 100 billion galaxies in the (observable) Universe. Now, we are all revising our talking points because it seems that number is twenty times too small. A team led by Christopher Conselice places the new estimate of galaxies in the Universe at two trillion!
Also features: spiders, Dr. Seuss, Mt. Everest, and the Oregon Trail.
Read the full article here.
