Hubble Space Telescope Provides Galactic Census
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From Times Staff and Wire Reports
The Hubble Space Telescope has taken a mosaic of photos that includes more than 40,000 galaxies in a patch of sky about the size of the full moon.
The study, combining 78 separate exposures by the Hubble, gives astronomers a wide sampling of many galaxies that could be used to study how the massive groupings of stars originate, change shape and move together in clusters.
Eric F. Bell of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, said the study suggested that there were at least 1.6 billion galaxies the size of the Milky Way out to a distance of 9 billion light-years.
