Astronomers defy the zone of avoidance to find hundreds of new galaxies

There is a region of the sky where astronomers fear to look. Filled with dark clouds of dust, it hides an unseen mass. A mass so large it is pulling the Milky Way and other galaxies toward it.

Okay, maybe that’s overdramatic, but it is true. The region is known as the Zone of Avoidance, and it happens to be in the general direction of the galactic center. Our view of the universe isn’t as perfect as we’d like. The sun is located within the galactic plane of the Milky Way, about 30,000 light-years from its center. If we look to the north or south of the galactic plane, we get a pretty normal view of the cosmos. We can peer deep into the sky and see distant galaxies.

But if we look toward the galactic center, we don’t have a clear view. Instead, we see a bunch of stars, gas, and dust. This is fine if you want to study stars, gas, and dust, but it means our view of the distant universe is obscured in that direction. If you want to get an unbiased view of the cosmos, you avoid that region, hence the term.

It’s also true that we’re being pulled in that direction. There happens to be a supercluster of galaxies that way, called the Great Attractor. We can map it out a bit by studying the relative motion of nearby galaxies, and we can observe X-rays from the supercluster, so we know it’s out there. But with all the gas and dust in the Zone of Avoidance, we can’t study it in the optical. One thing we know so far is that the Great Attractor actually consists of multiple clusters. The closest one is known as the Norma cluster, while a larger and more distant one is called the Vela supercluster. Still, there is much we don’t know about the region.

Fortunately, radio light can penetrate the dust of the Zone, so radio astronomers have tried to map the region. One downside is that radio telescopes often don’t have a large field of view, so it’s difficult to map the region. But a new work is making progress. The paper is published on the arXiv preprint server.

The new study uses data from the MeerKAT array telescope in South Africa. MeerKAT is particularly sensitive to the radio emissions of neutral hydrogen, known as the HI or [21-centimeter] line. Since hydrogen is so abundant in the universe, the distribution of hydrogen tells us the distribution of galaxies and clusters.

The study mapped the region of the Zone in the direction of the Vela supercluster with enough resolution to distinguish individual pockets of neutral hydrogen, each surrounding a galaxy. In this way, the team was able to discover 719 galaxies within the Vela cluster. Less than a third of them had been known previously.

This was just the first detailed survey of the Vela supercluster by MeerKAT, and it shows the real power of this relatively new observatory. Future studies should give us an even better understanding of the zone astronomers so often avoid.