Nor does it mean that the universe has a mass ten times higher than what we calculated. The mass is the same as before but distributed in a different way to what we believed until now. Parallelism is like knowing that 1 million people live in a city, and discover that they live in 100,000 buildings instead of 10,000. The amount of population remains the same, but its distribution is different.
As the authors of the study say, the total number of galaxies in the universe is an interesting question, although it does not have to reveal any fundamental information about the cosmology or the functioning of the cosmos. In a way, we could say that it is one of those curiosities that is very well to know but that, in the end, does not change our previous perception.
How Can We Calculate?
To reach this conclusion, the researchers observed the most profound images of the universe, taken in different works. For example, the ultra-deep field image of the Hubble telescope. For that image, the famous telescope focused on a single point in the sky for 1 million seconds (approximately 11 days), to see what it captured. The result is an image that is impressive both in its beauty and its depth.