Seeing behind the Milky Way

Scientists have gotten their first glimpse
beyond the Milky Way’s dense collection
of dust and stars – and discovered
hundreds of hidden galaxies in that
previously unexplored region of space.
An international team of scientists used a
specially equipped radio telescope based
in Australia to peer through the central
disc of the Milky Way, and spotted 883
galaxies. “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,” the study’s co-author,
Renée Kraan-Korteweg, tells Astronomy.com.
Like the Milky Way, the newly discovered
galaxies are being pulled toward a
gravitational anomaly known as the
Great Attractor, which is exerting the
gravitational force of a million billion Suns
on everything in our region of space.