Universe may not be that crowded

According to a new study, Universe may have smaller number of galaxies than what was thought earlier. Brian O'Shea, MSU associate professor of physics and astronomy and his team was involved in the study.

According to O'Shea, “Earlier estimates placed the number of faint galaxies in the early universe to be hundreds or thousands of times larger than the few bright galaxies that we can actually see with the Hubble Space Telescope”. He added that they think that number could be almost ten times larger.

The National Science Foundation’s Blue Waters supercomputer was used by O’Shea and his team in order to run simulations to know about the formation of galaxies in the early universe. Thousands of galaxies were simulated by the team, together with interactions of the galaxies through gravity or radiation.

As per reports, the simulated galaxies were compatible with observed distant galaxies at the bright end of the distribution i.e. the ones that have been found and confirmed. But simulations didn’t tell about an increasing number of faint galaxies, what was earlier predicted. O’Shea said that the ones at the lower end of the brightness distribution, their number was unchanged in place of increasing quickly.