#zone of avoidance

Scientists discover massive 'extragalactic structure' behind the Milky Way | Live Science

An uncharted region of space known as the "zone of avoidance" lurks behind the Milky Way's center – and astronomers just found an enormous, multi-galaxy structure there

Astronomers have detected an enormous extragalactic structure hiding in an uncharted region of space far beyond the Milky Way's center.

This phantom region, known as the zone of avoidance, is a blank spot on our map of the universe, comprising somewhere between 10% and 20% of the night sky. The reason we can't see it — at least with standard visible light telescopes — is because the Milky Way's bulging center blocks our view of it; the center of our galaxy is so dense with stars, dust and other matter that light from the zone of avoidance gets scattered or absorbed before reaching Earth's telescopes.

However, researchers have had better luck uncovering the zone's secrets with telescopes that can detect infrared radiation — a type of energy that's invisible to human eyes, but powerful enough to shine through dense clouds of gas and dust. Infrared surveys of the zone of avoidance have found evidence of thousands of individual galaxies shining through the cosmic fog, though little is known about the large-scale structures that lurk there.

Now, researchers have combined data from several of those infrared surveys to reveal the most colossal structure ever detected in the zone of avoidance, according to a study published Oct. 28 on the preprint database arXiv.org. (This study has not yet been peer reviewed, though it has been submitted for review to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics).

“Enormous Ghost Galaxy” –Hidden In the Milky Way’s ‘Zone of Avoidance’

(THIS ARTICLE IS COURTESY OF THE DAILY GALAXY)

  “Enormous Ghost Galaxy” –Hidden In the Milky Way’s ‘Zone of Avoidance’ (Weekend Feature) Posted on May 18, 2019

  An enormous ‘ghost’ galaxy, believed to be one of the oldest in the universe, was detected lurking on the outskirts of the Milky Way in November of 2018 by a team of astronomers who discovered the massive object when trawling through…

Glance at the night sky from a clear vantage point, and the thick band of the Milky Way will slash across the sky.

But the stars and dust that paint our galaxy’s disk are an unwelcome sight to astronomers who study all the galaxies that lie beyond our own. It’s like a thick stripe of fog across a windshield, a blur that renders our knowledge of the greater universe incomplete.

Astronomers call it the Zone of Avoidance.

Renée Kraan-Korteweg has spent her career trying to uncover what lies beyond the zone. She first caught a whiff of something spectacular in the background when, in the 1980s, she found hints of a potential cluster of objects on old photographic survey plates. Over the next few decades, the hints of a large-scale structure kept coming.

Late last year, Kraan-Korteweg and colleagues announced that they had discovered an enormous cosmic structure: a “supercluster” of thousands upon thousands of galaxies.

csirogramNot only did a team of international #astronomers use our Parkes Radio Telescope to help them find hundreds of new galaxies (in an area dubbed the Zone of Avoidance), they’ve also found that this area obscures the Great Attractor: a distant #galaxy #supercluster pulling our own #MilkyWay and other galaxies in its sphere of influence towards it at two million kilometres an hour, with the #gravitational pull equivalent to one million billion #suns.