How much of our observable outer space is undiscovered?

Question

I recently saw a post regarding the discovery of a new nebula by a hobbyist. I would like someone to explain how this is possible given the thousands of satellites we have.

In: 0

Answer 1

This isn’t really an answerable question because what do you even count as “discovered”? That’s a subjective measurement.

Also, almost no satellites look at space. The overwhelming majority of satellites are used for Earth-based applications like communications or Earth observation. At any given time, there are only a dozen or so space telescopes in operation, and there have been maybe 100 or so *ever* since the spaceflight era started in 1957.