A photo taken in 2006 by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a cluster of diverse galaxies, including a bright elliptical galaxy.

News | 12.01.2010

How Many Stars? Three Times as Many as We Thought, Report Says

This undercounting, of cool, dim dwarf stars in certain galaxies, could throw a monkey wrench into astronomers’ understanding of how galaxies formed and grew over the eons.

“It’s very problematic,” said Pieter van Dokkum, a professor of astronomy at Yale who reported the findings in the journal Nature with Charlie Conroy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass...

Image Credits: (header) European Space Agency & NASA; (left) NASA, via Associated Press; (background) NASA, ESA and H.E. Bond (STScI)