They were only 250 million light-years from Earth, but were hidden by the dusty material and stars that surround our galaxy, the Milky Way. Now, thanks to an innovative receiver from the Parkes radio telescope of the CSIRO organization (Australia), the discovery of up to 883 galaxies beyond the Milky Way has been possible.
The discovery of hundreds of new galaxies , many of them unknown to astronomers (almost a third) has occurred in the surroundings of the mysterious Great Attractor (or the Wall), that gravitational anomaly, of intergalactic space, located in the center of the supercluster. Virgo and attracts other galaxies like ours with a gravitational force equivalent to billions of suns.
What really is the Great Attractor?
The gravitational “pull” of this impressive gravitational anomaly affects the expansion movements of thousands and thousands of galaxies in Laniakea, the supercluster of galaxies to which ours belongs, but for the moment it remains a mystery: “We do not really understand what is causing this gravitational acceleration in the Milky Way or where it comes from ” , explains Lister Staveley-Smith, leader of the study.
Hundreds of new galaxies
The Milky Way completely blocks the more distant galaxies behind it ; However, thanks to this research, scientists have been able to identify new structures that could shed some light on this movement of our galaxy and learn more about the Great Attractor.
” Three new concentrations of galaxies (called NW1, NW2 and NW3) are key to confirm the diagonal crossing of the Wall between the clusters called Norma and CIZA J1324.7-5736,” the authors state.
“An average galaxy contains about 100,000 million stars, so finding hundreds of new ones hidden behind the Milky Way indicates a large amount of mass that we knew nothing about until now”, explains Renée Kraan-Korteweg, co-author of the research
The work has been published in the Astronomical Journal .
