Space questions, answered

How many galaxies are there in the universe?

Estimates range from about 100 billion to as many as two trillion galaxies in the observable universe — and each holds anywhere from millions to hundreds of billions of stars.

The Hubble and James Webb telescopes reached this figure by counting galaxies in tiny patches of sky and scaling up. Deeper surveys keep finding more, especially faint early galaxies, so the number is a floor rather than a ceiling.

And that's only the observable universe — the part whose light has had time to reach us. The whole universe may be far larger, or infinite.

Sources: NASA — how many galaxies