• Question: How many galaxies have we discovered, and what are they called?

    Asked by anon-219125 to Nicolas on 20 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Nicolas Bonne

      Nicolas Bonne answered on 20 Jun 2019:

      Galaxies have lots and lots of different names. The nearby ones have names like Andromeda, Whirlpool galaxy, Pinwheel galaxy, the Sombrero and the Mice, but most galaxies just have a string of numbers and letters that astronomers can use to work out where they are in the sky, and where the information about them is stored.

      We can’t see all of the galaxies in the Universe, because some of them are tiny and too far away. Quite a bit of our own galaxy also gets in the way, so there are big patches of the sky that we can’t see very well. We do think that there are around 2 trillion (2,000,000,000,000) galaxies in the Universe though, based on what we can see.

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