Scientists Find Hundreds Of Galaxies Hidden Behind The Milky Way
‘Hidden Galaxies In The Zone Of Avoidance’ may sound like a Fall Out Boy song title but in fact it’s a major scientific discovery of hundreds of hidden galaxies just down the intergalactic road from Earth.
The findings may help scientists to work out why the entire Milky Way is slowly being sucked into a region known as the Great Attractor.
The new galaxies had been hidden from view by our own galaxy, the Milky Way, despite being just 250 million light years away which is actually pretty close in astronomical terms.
But using a nifty Parkes radio telescope with an innovative receiver, a team of scientists were able to see through the stars and dust of the Milky Way to 883 galaxies, a third of which had never been seen before.
The area known as the Great Attractor appears to be drawing the Milky Way and hundreds of thousands of other galaxies towards it with a gravitational force equivalent to a million billion suns.
Yes, that’s the force of a million billion suns slowly sucking us all into a void - and we don’t understand much about it.
Scientists have been trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious Great Attractor since major deviations from universal expansion were first discovered in the 1970s and 1980s.
“We don’t actually understand what’s causing this gravitational acceleration on the Milky Way or where it’s coming from,” lead author Professor Lister Staveley-Smith, from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said.
“We know that in this region there are a few very large collections of galaxies we call clusters or superclusters, and our whole Milky Way is moving towards them at more than two million kilometres per hour.”
The research identified several new structures that could help to explain the movement of the Milky Way, including three galaxy concentrations (named NW1, NW2 and NW3) and two new clusters (named CW1 and CW2).
Anything that can help humankind get to the bottom of why a million billion suns’ worth of force is dragging our entire galaxy towards it has to be a good thing. And, possibly, the plot of an alright Bruce Willis film in the near future.
