An international group of scientists has made a ground-breaking discovery in the form of a cluster of over 800 different galaxies hiding on the other side of the Milky Way.
The team, which included personnel from South Africa, Australia, The Netherlands state that the hidden galaxies are just 250 million light years from Earth.
Professor Staveley-Smith explained why the have remained hidden for so long.
“The Milky Way is very beautiful, of course, and it’s very interesting to study our own Galaxy, but it completely blocks out the view of the more distant galaxies behind it,” he said.
The discovery paves the way for a better understanding, among other things, on a mysterious gravitational anomaly dubbed the Great Attractor.
“Thanks to the 64m Parkes Radio Telescope (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), which was equipped with an innovative receiver that can scan the sky 13 times faster than before, the scientists were able to survey this hidden part of the universe much more efficiently,” a statement on the University of Cape Town’s website explained.
Professor Renée C. Kraan-Korteweg, Chair of Astronomy at UCT, explained how the galaxies were spotted: “We’ve used a range of techniques, including telescopes at the SAAO, but only radio observations have really succeeded in allowing us to see through the thickest foreground layer of dust and stars in the inner Milky Way.”
“An average galaxy contains 100 billion stars, so finding hundreds of new galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way points to a lot of mass we didn’t know about until now.”
