What's Lurking Behind the Milky Way

Can't Stop Thinking About

- By Caroline Delbert

Scientists say they've discovered a "large scale structure" in a largely unseen part of the Milky Way galaxy, according to a preprint paper published to the arXiv server late last year. (It's been submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, but it has not yet been peer-reviewed.)

To be clear, the structure here is not any kind of human-made object; rather, it's a newfound galaxy cluster that's been hiding out behind the Milky Way. Given how hard it is to observe other objects through the Milky Way, it's exciting that researchers were able to find this galaxy cluster at all.

Looking Through the Galaxy → The problem with looking "through" the Milky Way galaxy to what lies beyond is that you're dealing with an obscurity created by the Milky Way itself, called the Zone of Avoidance (ZOA). Sure, the galaxy is mostly empty space, and you could look "through" quite a bit of our local solar system in that sense, but there are two complicating factors.