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This photo provided by NASA, taken in 2006 by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a cluster of diverse galaxies. A new study led by a Yale University astronomer looks at elliptical galaxies, such as the bright one in the top middle of this 2006 Hubble Space Telescope photograph, and finds they have far more stars than initially thought. That means the universe may have three times more stars than astronomers previously figured. The bright part of the Hubble photo shows a cluster of galaxies 450 million light years with the giant elliptical galaxy ESO 325-G004 looming large at the cluster's center. (AP Photo/NASA)
LOS ANGELES — Here’s a finding that may make some stargazers do a double-take through their telescopes: There may be three times as many stars in the universe as we thought. Fixing this astronomical miscalculation may force some researchers to reconsider what far-off galaxies really look like and how the stars within them came to be.
"It has terrifying implications for a lot of the astronomy we do," said Caltech astronomer Richard Ellis, who was not involved in the work.
Previous star counts relied on the assumption that the larger universe looks much like our own galaxy. But authors of a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature say that there are many more red dwarfs — small, dim stars that can’t be picked out individually when very far off — in certain other galaxies than in the Milky Way.
The new census, based on analysis of the light signature of the galaxies using instruments at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, pushes the total number of stars in the universe to 300 sextillion (that’s 100 billion squared, multiplied by 30).
Red dwarfs are often a mere 10 percent to 20 percent of the mass of the sun, and hundreds of times dimmer. That makes them so faint as to be undetectable at great distances. To make up for what they couldn’t see, astronomers for decades have assumed that the proportion of red dwarfs in other galaxies would be similar to the ratio known to exist in our own, said Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum, the study’s lead author.
Armed with recent advances that enabled them to better detect the faint signals of dim, low-mass stars, van Dokkum and co-worker Charlie Conroy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics looked at the radiation emanating from eight elliptical galaxies between 50 million and 300 million light years from Earth. These types of galaxies have a bulging shape and typically contain relatively old stars — very different from spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, which have stars arrayed in flat, rotating disks and armlike projections where new stars are growing.
If any galaxy would look different from ours on the inside, it would be these elliptical types, van Dokkum and Conroy figured.
The scientists looked at the light given off by these galaxies to determine what chemicals were present, and in what amounts — revealing what kinds of stars they came from. They found strong signs of sodium and iron, which are typically found in feeble, low-mass stars. They calculated that the strength of the sodium and iron signatures was enough to raise the red dwarf estimate within these galaxies by a factor of nine.
If that calculation holds for all elliptical galaxies — which constitute one-third of all known galaxies — that would triple the star census of the universe.
Ellis said the results are not yet ironclad, in part because this paper relies on an assumption of its own: that red dwarfs in other galaxies have the same proportion of sodium, iron and other chemicals as red dwarfs in our own.
Should future studies confirm the findings, astronomers may need to rejigger all kinds of basic numbers.
Among them: The young universe may have had different proportions of stars than it does today. Stars and galaxies may grow differently than scientists believed. There may be slightly less dark matter in the centers of these galaxies than had been predicted.
And with so many more stars available, the probability that an Earth-like planet — and other forms of life — exist in distant parts of space is much higher, too.
"It’s a bit like going to another country and realizing the rules and customs you’re used to in your own country no longer apply," Ellis said.
