Im looking for an answer like “thousands” or “millions.” If a more specific answer is possible, that would be great too. How many of these could i see with just an average telescope? On a final note, can someone recommend an “average telescope” to me with the max price being somewhere near 250 usd?
As usual, thanks in advance because my questions are always answered here,
culov
How about more on the line of billions. I was once told there was billions of galaxies with billions of stars each. That’s a lot of stars.
IIRC, an astronomy paper that came out recently said that there were as many galaxies in the universe as there were stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which means that there are somewhere on the order of 500,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe.
Well, the canonical number of stars in our galaxy is 10[sup]11[/sup] = 100,000,000,000. But certainly a factor of 5 is no big deal.
To answer the second part of the question, it depends greatly on sky condition. Under a light-polluted city sky, even a 10-inch aperture telescope (fairly large for an amateur telescope) will show fewer than 10 galaxies. If you drive far away from the city on a moonless night you can see more galaxies with a decent pair of 7x50 binoculars.
In fact, for a budget of $250 you may be better off buying a good pair of binoculars than a telescope. I suggest you first find a local astronomy club and attend one of their public viewing events, where you’ll be able to compare different types of telescopes and get more advice than you’d ever need.
From here; (slightly old information)
http://www.anzwers.org/free/universe/universe.html
Number of superclusters in the visible universe = 270 000
Number of galaxy groups in the visible universe = 500 million
Number of large galaxies in the visible universe = 10 billion
Number of dwarf galaxies in the visible universe = 100 billion
Number of stars in the visible universe = 2000 billion billion
However so far nobody has catalogued more than about 0.1% if that. To do that we would need a Hubble Deep Field image of every segment of the sky;
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980607.html
maybe one day…
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
And what I find incomprehensible in all this, is the fact that all the stars in all those galaxies started as a very small mass, just before the Big Bang.
How small is small?
In “The Cosmos,” didn’t Sagan said it was about “…the size of your thumbnail…”
I think some other cosmologists say “…the size of your fist…”
These guys love to confound us with statements to the effect that there is no single place where the original explosion occurred; it happened here, there and everywhere.
Well hell. If all the shit in the entire Universe was compressed into one fistfull of mass, isn’t that the Universe itself, and didn’t the Big Bang happen right there?
And with all the galaxies moving away from each other, doesn’t this suggest we can point to, or even imagine the location of the BB’s central point, away from which, everything is radiating (if that term is sufficient)?
Cosmologists, it seems, say no.
Has anyone ever performed an experiment along these lines?
Say using an enormous globe with an explosive charge at the center. When the mass is exploded, will the particles’ paths resemble galactic expansion?
Billions and Billions. Someone had to say it!
You’re confusing size with mass. All the mass of the universe was compressed into that really small space. So, it was small, but incomprehensively heavy.
Um, the expansion of spacetime is a little different than detonating a sack of grain in your garage. 
You ask if we can determine a point from which everything is radiating. Yes. We are at one such point. Objects at cosmological distances are moving away from us in every direction we look. That doesn’t mean we’re at the center, of course, and it also doesn’t mean that a center even exists.
If the universe is infinite now, then it’s been infinite from the very beginning. Visualize that if you can.
I can see why it has to be true, but I’m not sure I understand what it means.
Who says the universe is infinite?
Most cosmologists now think the universe is infinite.
No. Or rather, yes…but. When a cosmologist refese to the universe as being infinte, he means he believes it to be flat, an therefore will expand forever. He does not mean it is infinite in extent.
Refese? I mean refers. Need more coffee…
Okay, if the Universe is finite, does it mean that expansion will someday stop?
What do the cosmologists suggest is at the outermost fringe?
What happens to the galaxies when they reach this boundary?
Yes, that’s the definition of finite, in cosmology. Closed is another term for it.
No one knows for sure. Some suggest that the universe “wraps around” like a video game, so if you continue in a straight line, eventually you’ll return to your starting point.
This can’t happen. Galaxies move because space is expanding. They can’t ever reach the “edge”. To use the old balloon analogy, if you put dots on the surface of a balloon and then blow it up, you’ll see tthe dots move away from each other. Assuming it is an infinitely stretchy balloon, no matter how much you blow it up, none of the dots will ever leave the surface of it, because they can’t. They are confined to its surface in the same way that galaxies are confied to space.
It’s not universally accepted that all the shit in the entire Universe was ever compressed into one fistful of mass:
This would be a good place to offer up this awesome link: The Universe
You get to zoom out from a region of 12.5 light years from the sun all the way back out to 14 billion light-years. It’s a great site for giving you some indication of the vast scale we’re talking about.