Missing Galaxies? Now There’s Too Many

[Binary_Bark]

Gaze skyward from the Southern Hemisphere and it’s hard to miss the Large Magellanic Cloud. The fact that it looks like one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, albeit smaller, reveals that it’s a small galaxy roughly 30,000 light-years across with a few billion stars. Indeed, any small telescope will show that it’s scattered with glowing nebulae that are punctured by dark dollops of dust.

And it isn’t the only satellite galaxy that slowly swirls around the Milky Way. By 1999, astronomers had detected a dozen companions, many of them invisible to the unaided eye. But at that time, computer simulations of the evolution of the universe had predicted that the Milky Way’s neighbourhood should be bustling with activity — hosting not a dozen, but thousands, of tiny companions. So where were the missing satellites?

More At: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-...axies-gives-way-now-theres-too-many-20190109/

 

[MirageF1]

Interesting read thanks....the essence being that

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Today, most astronomers argue that there are likely 100 billion galaxies across the observable universe. But these are Milky-Way-size galaxies. If you extend the count down to these mini-galaxies, then there might be more like 10 million billion galaxies in all.

Picture that classic image of the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field — the unforgettable million-second exposure that revealed 10,000 galaxies in a small patch of dark sky. There could be 100,000 more small galaxies in that image that are hidden from view. Sure, they might not look like the iconic galaxies we’ve seen in the Hubble archives, instead resembling the faint smudge Willman detected in 2004. But the discoveries of the past few years suggest that there are many more galaxies than meet Hubble’s eye."