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Galaxies: Who's Counting

 

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Galaxies: Who's Counting Summary
[Updated 10/15/07]

The Urantia Book describes in great detail how the physical universe is organized. In so doing it states, "In the not-distant future, new telescopes will reveal to the wondering gaze of . . . astronomers no less than 375 million new galaxies in the remote stretches of outer space." The Urantia Book was first published in 1955. In 1977 a Scientific American article noted that astronomers estimated that there were about 10 million visible galaxies. Data collected by the Hubble telescope greatly increased earlier estimates. Currently, astronomers estimate that there are well over 100 billion galaxies.

 

Galaxies: Who's Counting: Class C Report
[Updated 10/11/07]

The Urantia Book says that in the "not-distant future" our instruments will see no less than 375 million galaxies. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched (and then repaired) in the early 1990's has made this statement more than true. Estimates of the number of observable galaxies now range over 100 billion. Even though this statement has come true, it is placed in the Class C category because this prediction is not considered to be a particularly unlikely prediction.

 

Galaxies: Who's Counting Report
Prepared by Phil Calabrese, PhD, Chris Halvorson, PhD, and Halbert Katzen, JD with special thanks to Dan Massey.
[Updated 2/12/08]

The Urantia Book, published in 1955, states:

In the not-distant future, new telescopes will reveal to the wondering gaze of Urantian [our] astronomers no less than 375 million new galaxies in the remote stretches of outer space.1

Even decades after The Urantia Book was published, astronomers thought that there would be a limit to how far out into space we would be able to see. It was not generally assumed that the invention of more powerful telescopes would lead to the ability to see more and more galaxies.

In the 1930s, Richard Tolman proposed such a test, really good data for which are only now becoming available. Tolman calculated that the surface brightness (the apparent brightness per unit area) of receding galaxies should fall off in a particularly dramatic way with redshift-indeed, so dramatically that those of us building the first cameras for the Hubble Space Telescope in the 1980s were told by cosmologists not to worry about distant galaxies, because we simply wouldn't see them. Imagine our surprise therefore when every deep Hubble image turned out to have hundreds of apparently distant galaxies scattered all over it . . .2

The website found in the preparation of this report with the most comprehensive history about counting galaxies states:

What's really up in [the] sky, was realized after finishing the first Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS). This was the signal for scanning the skies systematically to catalogue different object classes. George Abell started in 1958, searching for rich clusters of galaxies - he found 2712. Vorontsov-Velyaminov and also Fritz Zwicky scanned the POSS for galaxies (all three by visual [sic] inspecting copies of the original plates). Vorontsov-Velyaminov and his coworkers published the data of 29981 galaxies in the Morphological Catalogue of Galaxies (MCG) between 1962 and 1974. Zwicky and his coworkers published the Catalogue of Galaxies and of Clusters of Galaxies (CGCG) between 1963 and 1968, containing 29378 galaxies and 9133 clusters of galaxies. Zwicky later wrote, that he has identified more then [sic] 1,5 Millionen [1.5 million] galaxies (cluster members included) on the POSS.3

By 1977 estimates were in the range of 10 million galaxies visible to a distance of 2,800 million light years.4 In 1995 Exploration of the Universe, 7th ed. stated, "Our telescopes can see many billion of them within reach of modern instruments."5 Just a few years later World Book Encyclopedia reported that "Studies of distant space with optical and radio telescopes indicate that there may be about 100 billion galaxies in the universe."6

The estimation of the number of observable galaxies continues to grow. The Hubble Space Telescope has been instrumental in expanding our appreciation for the vastness of the universe. Some researches even put the number of galaxies at over a trillion.7

This brief history demonstrates that, when it was published, the number of observable galaxies being estimated by astronomers was less than a tenth of a percent of the 375 million galaxies mentioned in The Urantia Book as a minimum number to be seen in the "not-distant future." Currently, some estimates are more than two hundred times this minimum.

All contemporary estimates of the total number of galaxies are extrapolations from observations of a relatively small part of the celestial dome, not from direct observations. For this reason these numbers can only be expressed as rough estimates.

The term "outer space" has specific meaning in The Urantia Book. Its comment about seeing "no less than 375 million new galaxies in the remote stretches of outer space" comes in Paper 12: The Universe of Universes. This section of The Urantia Book describes how there are seven inhabited "superuniverses," each roughly equivalent to what we refer to as the Milky Way Galaxy:

Practically all of the starry realms visible to the naked eye on Urantia belong to the seventh section of the grand universe, the superuniverse of Orvonton. The vast Milky Way starry system represents the central nucleus of Orvonton. . . This great aggregation of suns, dark islands of space, double stars, globular clusters, star clouds, spiral and other nebulae, together with myriads of individual planets, forms a watchlike, elongated-circular grouping of about one seventh of the inhabited evolutionary universes.8

"Outer space" refers to currently uninhabited regions beyond the seven superuniverses that are being prepared and organized for future habitation. The Urantia Book says that there are currently four outer space levels.9

The Outer Space Levels. Far out in space, at an enormous distance from the seven inhabited superuniverses, there are assembling vast and unbelievably stupendous circuits of force and materializing energies. Between the energy circuits of the seven superuniverses and this gigantic outer belt of force activity, there is a space zone of comparative quiet, which varies in width but averages about four hundred thousand light-years. These space zones are free from star dust-cosmic fog. . . [A]bout one-half million light-years beyond the periphery of the present grand universe . . . [is] the beginnings of a zone of an unbelievable energy action which increases in volume and intensity for over twenty-five million light-years. These tremendous wheels of energizing forces are situated in the first outer space level, a continuous belt of cosmic activity encircling the whole of the known, organized, and inhabited creation.

 

Still greater activities are taking place beyond these regions. . . These activities undoubtedly presage the organization of the material creations of the second outer space level. . .10

The superuniverses are said to rotate opposite the first outer space level.

Although your spectroscopic estimations of astronomic velocities are fairly reliable when applied to the starry realms belonging to your superuniverse and its associate superuniverses, such reckonings with reference to the realms of outer space are wholly unreliable. . .

 

But the greatest of all such distortions arises because the vast universes of outer space in the realms next to the domains of the seven superuniverses, seem [to the purported celestial authors of The Urantia Book] to be revolving in a direction opposite to that of the grand universe. That is, these myriads of nebulae and their accompanying suns and spheres are at the present time revolving clockwise about the central creation. The seven superuniverses revolve about Paradise in a counterclockwise direction. It appears that the second outer universe of galaxies, like the seven superuniverses, revolves counterclockwise about Paradise.11

Physicist Chris Halvorson, Ph.D., who is also an Urantia Book scholar, considers the current estimates of the number of observable galaxies to be gross overestimates. He points out that distinguished astronomers-such as Halton Arp, Geoffrey Burbidge, and Margaret Burbidge-have published extensive evidence indicating that high redshift objects are not extremely remote, as most astronomers assume, and that younger objects have greater intrinsic (nonvelocity) redshifts. Halvorson thinks that this evidence suggests that the high redshift galaxies in the Deep Field images are not billions of light years away; they are only a few hundred million light years away (in what would be the second, not the third, outer space level, according to The Urantia Book). In addition, as described in The Urantia Book, the distribution of galaxies is not spherically symmetric: the levels are toroidal (doughnut-shaped). Together, these two ideas would imply that the current extrapolations, extrapolations to the entire celestial sphere of the number of galaxies in the very small angular areas of the Deep Field images, are huge overestimations.

Whether these considerations would reduce the estimate to a number near 375 million galaxies is yet unknown. Nonetheless, at this point in time, in all fairness, the only conclusion to reach based on the current and widely accepted estimates of the number of observable galaxies is that they are well in excess of the minimum number that The Urantia Book asserted in 1955 would be seen in the "not-distant future."

Galaxies: Who's Counting Raw Data
[Updated 8/30/07]

Urantia Book 12:2.3

http://www.astro.uu.nl/~strous/AA/en/antwoorden/melkwegstelsels.html#13 400 thousand million

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part8/section-4.html

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/TopazMurray.shtml multiple quotes of galaxy #'s

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=40 200 billion

http://www.astronomy.com/ASY/CS/forums/350013/ShowPost.aspx 127 billion

http://www.search.com/reference/Galaxy 125 billion

http://klima-luft.de/steinicke/Deep-Sky/deep-sky_e.htm history of mapping

http://klima-luft.de/steinicke/ngcic/history_e.htm

http://www.urantiabook.org/archive/science/milkyway.htm

 

From The Coming Scientific Validation of The Urantia Book:

a) "No less than 375 million new galaxies".  New cosmic maps of the whole universe are now confirming the bold cosmic predictions made by The Urantia Book before 1955:

Speaking about our astronomical observations, The Urantia Book says, ".with photographic technique the larger telescopes penetrate far beyond the borders of the grand universe into the domains of outer space, where untold universes are in process of organization. And there are yet other millions of universes beyond the range of your present instruments." "In the not-distant future, new telescopes will reveal to the wondering gaze of Urantian astronomers no less than 375 million new galaxies in the remote stretches of outer space." Page-130, Para-5 & Para-6

About 1990 with the publication of early deep space photos our scientific estimates of the number of galaxies changed from "5 to 10 million" to "at least 50 to 100 million". By 1997 World Book was saying "Studies of distant space with optical and radio telescopes indicate that there may be about 100 billion galaxies in the universe." [Wor97]

My how quickly scientific estimates change without hardly a look back or an admission of error in the enthusiasm of "new results", which are just as proudly asserted with the same certainty as the previous beliefs. The Urantia Book has to live with what it said in 1955, and it beat the galactic science of 1986!

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