• Question: how many galaxies have you discovered?

    Asked by anon-245295 to David on 8 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: David Sobral

      David Sobral answered on 8 Mar 2020: last edited 8 Mar 2020 11:21 pm

      It’s very hard to tell. Certainly more than 10 thousand, like the 4 thousand discovered recently (https://youtu.be/tKb2osj3nkU). Most of them I end up naming with code names and IDs that come from the name of the survey and something else that identifies the galaxy. Other times the coordinates on the sky are used as their names.

      Sometimes galaxies are so “wow” that they definitely need a special name as they then get discussed and studied world-wide. I have named a few, including CR7 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos_Redshift_7), but also VR7, MASOSA, BR3, among others.

      The good news is that our best current estimation is that there are 2 trillion galaxies out there, and therefore *so much* to be discovered!

      And you can also find your own distant galaxies with real data from the best telescopes: https://xgalweb.wordpress.com/xgal-diy-make-your-own-discoveries/ !

Comments