Every Galaxy We Could See
September 5, 2026 · by White Nights
In December 1995, astronomers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a patch of sky near the Big Dipper that appeared to contain nothing. No known stars, no known galaxies — just darkness. The telescope stared at that patch for ten consecutive days, gathering light.
What came back was the Hubble Deep Field: an image containing around 3,000 galaxies, some of them more than 10 billion light-years away, some of them among the oldest structures in the observable universe. A few appeared to be early galaxies, seen as they existed within a billion years of the Big Bang. Galaxies in shapes and configurations never seen before — irregular, interacting, forming, disturbed.
The patch of sky the telescope stared at was approximately one 24-millionth of the total sky. Scale that up and the implication is staggering: the universe contains something in the order of 200 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars.
The decision to spend ten days of Hubble time on what might have turned out to be nothing was not universally popular. Robert Williams, then director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, used his director's discretionary time to do it without going through committee. He later said he simply thought there might be something there, and that if there wasn't, it was his problem. There was something there.
Two subsequent deep fields — the Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 2004, and the Hubble Extreme Deep Field in 2012 — went deeper and confirmed the picture: wherever you point the telescope, the universe is full of galaxies all the way down.