Racing at 2 million kms/hr!
Hundreds of galaxies hiding on the other side of the Milky Way have been discovered by an international team of scientists. They were able to see through the stars and dust of the Milky Way, into a previously unexplored region of space using the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia.
Despite being just 250 million light years from Earth—very close in astronomical terms—the new galaxies had been hidden from view until now by our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
The discovery may help to explain the Great Attractor region, which 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.
Lead author Professor Lister Staveley-Smith, from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said the team found 883 galaxies, a third of which had never been seen before. Professor Staveley-Smith said 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,” he 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 and two new clusters. “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.” (Read the full article here)
[Update: “Einstein’s greatest prediction may have been correct: The titanic forces unleashed by two colliding black holes has reportedly exposed the fabric of space-time itself through long-elusive gravitational waves.” Read article from NZ Herald here.]
