Re: The Astronomy Thread
Posted: Wed May 18, 2016 1:13 pm
In the most mindblowing bit of astronomical information I've chanced on for a long time, it turns out that the Milky Way has literally hundreds of previously unknown nearby galaxies, that have never been seen before, simply due to being hidden by the Milky Way.
This is an artists's impression, but the positions of the galaxies and their relative shapes and sizes are represented accurately: The Parkes radio telescope in Aus studied the nearby galaxies. It looked at a total of 883 galaxies, and of which, one third have never been seen before. As one of the astronomers put it: "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." These galaxies are in the direction of the so-called "Zone of Avoidance, basically directly the other side of the centre of the galaxy from us, and are so hard to see as we have to detect radiation that has managed to get through the entire Milky Way, which is not a lot. The full article is here. At the end of the article is a good animation illustrating where these galaxies are in relation to us. |
In the most mindblowing bit of astronomical information I've chanced on for a long time, it turns out that the Milky Way has literally hundreds of previously unknown nearby galaxies, that have never been seen before, simply due to being hidden by the Milky Way.
This is an artists's impression, but the positions of the galaxies and their relative shapes and sizes are represented accurately: The Parkes radio telescope in Aus studied the nearby galaxies. It looked at a total of 883 galaxies, and of which, one third have never been seen before. As one of the astronomers put it: "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." These galaxies are in the direction of the so-called "Zone of Avoidance, basically directly the other side of the centre of the galaxy from us, and are so hard to see as we have to detect radiation that has managed to get through the entire Milky Way, which is not a lot. The full article is here. At the end of the article is a good animation illustrating where these galaxies are in relation to us. |
|