Due to the bulge at the center of the Milky Way, scientists’ view of the night sky from Earth has been partially blocked, known as the “hidden belt.” Over the past few years, researchers have used a variety of tools to try to better understand what might be hiding behind the belt, and have now finally identified several galaxies hidden behind the belt that the researchers think may join many more galaxies in giant extragalaxies structure.
The Zone of Avoidance refers to the area of the sky that is obscured by the halo of the Milky Way and is difficult to observe. In addition, there is a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Millions of stars orbit around it, forming tight star clusters that are more difficult to see through. It prevents us from observing about 20% of the sky.
Scientists had to develop other methods to try to see through the cryptic light clutter, and over time they realized that the cryptic band became easier to investigate if they shifted focus from the visible to the infrared spectrum. So starting from the IRAS mission in 1983, various instruments have been observing the Milky Way in the infrared band for 40 years, while using X-ray and radio waves to explore, focusing on identifying the existence of galaxies or star clusters.
Recently, researchers scanned the galactic bulge with the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) and examined the region with the FLAMINGOS-2 near-infrared instrument on the Gemini South telescope, revealing some 3 billion light New details for 5 galaxies out of the year.
The researchers said that the redshift values obtained by three different methods are consistent with the estimated cluster parameters, indicating that these galaxies have the nature of galaxy clusters, or that there may be a huge extragalactic structure behind the Milky Way disk, containing as many as 58 galaxies. .
The new paper will be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
(Source of the first image: pixabay)
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