Astronomers Finally Map The Vela Supercluster: One Of The Largest Structures In The Known Universe Hidden Behind The Milky Way For A Decade
For ten years, one of the biggest things in the universe was hiding right behind our own galaxy.
The Vela Supercluster — a collection of at least 20 galaxy clusters, each containing hundreds or thousands of galaxies — was only discovered in 2016 because it sits around 800 million light years from Earth inside what astronomers call the Zone of Avoidance, the region of the night sky blocked by the Milky Way’s dense disk of stars and dust. (LiveScience)
Now scientists have finally mapped it properly, and the scale is breathtaking.
The structure stretches roughly 300 million light years across, around 3,000 times wider than the Milky Way, and contains matter equivalent to around 30 quadrillion suns. Most of this mass is split between two cores that are actively moving toward each other.
To achieve the mapping, researchers combined 65,000 existing galaxy measurements with around 8,000 new redshift observations, with the most critical data coming from South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope, which detected hydrogen gas clouds inside galaxies that visible light simply could not reach.
The Vela Supercluster now ranks as more massive than Laniakea, the supercluster that contains our own Milky Way, and sits as a close second to the Shapley Supercluster. The team also gave it a new name: Vela Banzi, meaning “revealing widely” in the Xhosa language of South Africa.
Something this massive was always there. We just finally looked hard enough to see it. Like this science oriented article? Read our previous article here.
