Stars and galaxies in the
constellation Vela, where a massive new supercluster has been
found.
European Southern
Observatory
Through the thick fog of our own galaxy, astronomers have spotted
an ultimate prize: one of the largest-known structures in the
universe.
Called the Vela supercluster, the newly discovered object is a
massive group of several galaxy clusters, each one containing
hundreds or thousands of galaxies.
“I could not believe such a major structure would pop up so
prominently” after an observation of that region of space, said
Renée
Kraan-Korteweg, an astrophysicist at the University of Cape
Town in South Africa, in a press release.
Kraan-Korteweg and her team published their
discovery of the supercluster, named after the constellation
Vela where it was found, in the Monthly Notices Letters of the
Royal Astronomical Society.
A giant hiding behind the Milky Way
The locations of the
Shapley supercluster and its newly discovered partner, the Vela
supercluster.
Thomas Jarrett/University of
Cape Town
It may be hard to believe that such a huge object could go
unnoticed, but it makes more sense when you consider where
we all live.
The Milky Way is our expansive galactic home. It hosts more than
100 billion stars, trillions of planets, and colorful clouds of
gas and dust.
This makes for a brilliant playground to study individual
objects, like
black holes, the formation of
alien solar systems, or
potentially habitable extrasolar planets.
But if you’re an astronomer trying to peer beyond the Milky Way
and into the deeper universe, all of this stuff is in your way:
You are
here.
NASA; Business
Insider
This is especially true of objects behind the galactic plane,
which is us looking through the 100,000-light-year-wide disk of
the Milky Way from the inside-out.
That cross-section of the Milky Way’s disk of stars, gas, and
dust is actually what we see when we look up in the sky in a very
dark place:
To peer through it, Kraan-Korteweg and her colleagues combined
the observations of several telescopes: the newly refurbished
South African Large Telescope (SALT) near Cape Town, the
Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) near Sydney, and X-ray surveys
of the galactic plane.
Using that data, they calculated how fast each galaxy they saw
above and below the galactic plane was moving away from Earth.
Their number-crunching soon revealed that they all seemed to be
moving together — indicating a lot of galaxies couldn’t be seen.
“[I]t became obvious we were uncovering a massive network of
galaxies, extending much further than we had ever expected,”
Michelle Cluver, an astrophysicist at the University of the
Western Cape, said in the release.
The researchers estimate that Vela supercluster is about the same
mass of the Shapley Supercluster of
roughly 8,600 galaxies, which is located about 650 million
light-years away. Given that the typical galaxy has about 100
billion stars, researchers estimate that Vela
could contain somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000
trillion stars.
Their calculations also show Vela is about 800 million
light-years distant and zooming farther and farther away from us
at a speed of about 40 million mph (18,000 kilometers per
second).
Despite that extra and rapidly increasing distance, however,
Vela’s influence can’t be denied. The researchers estimate that
Vela’s gravitational tug on the Local Group of galaxies, which
includes the Milky Way, has sped them up by about 110,000 mph (50
kilometers per second).
That’s quite a pull, and could help tell the incredible story of
how our
Milky Way galaxy — and we — got here.
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