Hundreds of hidden nearby galaxies have been studied for the first time, shedding light on a mysterious gravitational anomaly dubbed the Great Attractor.
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.
Using CSIRO‘s Parkes radio telescope equipped with an innovative receiver, an international team of scientists were able to see through the stars and dust of the Milky Way, into a previously unexplored region of space.
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.
The team found 883 galaxies, a third of which had never been seen before. 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.
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.
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).
Astronomers have been trying to map the galaxy distribution hidden behind the Milky Way for decades.
What Is The Great Attractor?
There’s a strange place in the sky where everything is attracted. Our galaxy and other nearby galaxies are being pulled toward a specific region of space. It’s about 150 million light years away, and here is the best part. Scientists call it the Great Attractor.
Part of the reason the Great Attractor is so mysterious is that it happens to lie in a direction of the sky known as the “Zone of Avoidance”. This is in the general direction of the center of our galaxy, where there is so much gas and dust that we can’t see very far in the visible spectrum.
When evidence of the Great Attractor was first discovered in the 1970s, we had no way to see through the Zone of Avoidance. But while that region blocks much of the visible light from beyond, the gas and dust doesn’t block as much infrared and x-ray light.
As x-ray astronomy became more powerful, we could start to see objects within that region. What we found was a large supercluster of galaxies in the area of the Great Attractor, known as the Norma Cluster. It has a mass of about 1,000 trillion Suns. That’s thousands of galaxies.
While the Norma Cluster is massive, and local galaxies are moving toward it, it doesn’t explain the full motion of local galaxies.
The mass of the Great Attractor isn’t large enough to account for the pull. When we look at an even larger region of galaxies, we find that the local galaxies and the Great Attractor are moving toward something even larger. It’s known as the Shapley Supercluster. It contains more than 8000 galaxies and has a mass of more than ten million billion Suns. The Shapley Supercluster is, in fact, the most massive galaxy cluster within a billion light years, and we and every galaxy in our corner of the Universe are moving toward it.