So now it turns out, what we call the observable universe — the portion observable within our cosmological horizon, a.k.a the final frontier — has at least 10 times moregalaxies than the mid-1990s Hubble Deep Field imageries sum to about 100 to 200 billion.

“It boggles the mind that over 90% of the galaxies in the universe have yet to be studied. Who knows what interesting properties we will find when we observe these galaxies with the next generation of telescopes,”

"It boggles the mind that over 90 percent of the galaxies in the universe have yet to be studied,” Christopher Conselice, the lead author on a new study on the topic and an astrophysics professor at the University of Nottingham, said in a statement. “Who knows what interesting properties we will find when we discover these galaxies with future generations of telescopes?”

"These results are powerful evidence that a significant galaxy evolution has taken place throughout the universe's history, which dramatically reduced the number of galaxies through mergers between them — thus reducing their total number,” Conselice said in the statement.

Space is steeped in mystery, and that very thought alone has made scientists determined to break through some of the biggest questions of all. Yet finding solutions to some only make more what-ifs arise. To say that space offers infinite discoveries would be a gross understatement.

“We spent a lot of time with a lot of telescopes to find anything associated with it,” explained Emily Petroff from the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, the study’s first author. “We got new wavelength windows we’ve never gotten before. . . . We’re still trying to figure out where this one came from.”

It’s easy to assume scientists are more than just perplexed, but downright frustrated. However, this isn’t merely a high school math problem, and scientists see a greater picture here.

Caption: DECam VR-band image of the FRB 150215 field. The blue circles represent the Parkes radio telescope beam (7.50', inner, solid line) and extended (15.00', outer, dashed line) positional error. The circles are centered on the pointing of the Parkes beam upon detection of FRB 150215. No transient event was found in the i-band stacked images within the region. Credit: arXiv:1705.02911 [astro-ph.HE]

“It’s not very often in science that you get to work on something that’s so brand new and so unknown that you get to answer the fundamental questions,” said Petroff, who’s discovered several FRBs. “It’s exciting to be in these very early stages of the field when you can make a big impact with your research and answer these really big questions.”

Astrophysicists have found an out-of-place supermassive black hole -- 12 billion times more enormous than the sun -- that mysteriously formed when the cosmos was less than 900 million years old.

“A very stimulating feature of this work is that the outcomes hint that in the early cosmos the supermassive black holes and their host galaxies did not co-evolve,” said astrophysicist Akos Bogdan, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who was not involved in the study.

“We can comparatively easily sense this object because it is brighter than others at the same distance,” Wu said.

“These objects are so far away from us so most of them look (very) faint even if their inherent brightness is large,” Wu said.

Fifty years ago, scientists discovered that the Earth is occasionally hit by cosmic rays of enormous energies. Since then, they have argued about the source of those ultra-high energy cosmic rays -- whether they came from our galaxy or outside the Milky Way.

"We are now considerably closer to solving the mystery of where and how these extraordinary particles are created -- a question of great interest to astrophysicists," said University of Wuppertal Prof. Karl-Heinz Kampert, spokesperson for the Auger Collaboration, which involves more than 400 scientists from 18 countries. "Our observation provides compelling evidence that the sites of acceleration are outside the Milky Way."

"This result unequivocally establishes that ultra-high energy cosmic rays are not just random wanderers of our nearby universe," said Paolo Privitera, UChicago professor in astronomy and astrophysics, who heads the U.S. groups participating in the project.

"The imprint detected in their arrival directions -- a tantalizing evidence for extragalactic origin -- required several years of observations with a detector working, in Jim Cronin's words, 'like a Swiss clock.' It was a tribute to Jim's vision to build an observatory and unveil the mystery of the origin of the most energetic particles in the universe," he said.