A Hundred Billion Galaxies

Perhaps you've heard that there are a hundred billion galaxies in the Universe. That's a soul-crushing number, so vast and unreachable that it's literally hard to believe. Let me make a believer out of you. That photo above is from the venerable Hubble Space Telescope. It's part of a colossal effort by astronomers, dubbed the Frontier Fields program, to peer as deeply as possible into a half-dozen galaxy clusters, veritable cities of galaxies that can contain thousands of galaxies like our own. ...