Beyond the milky Way discovered galactic wall

looks like a stellar core of the milky Way galaxy in infrared light. The image obtained by the space telescope NASA Spitzer. Behind it the wall of the South pole – curtain from thousands of galaxies, extending at least 700 million light-years.

Recently, astronomers have discovered that Milky Way there is a huge wall made up of thousands of galaxies, of clusters of trillions of stars and worlds, as well as the dust and gas arranged in the form of a curtain crossing at least 700 million light years of space. It winds for dust, gas and stars in our own galaxy from the constellation Perseus in the Northern hemisphere to the constellation APUS in the South. This wall is so massive that outraged the local expansion of the Universe, but you can't see it, as all this star cluster is located directly behind our home galaxy. Astronomers call this region the Zone of avoidance (Zone of Avoidance).

What is a galactic wall?

According to an article in The New York Times, an international team of astronomers, led by Daniel Pomareda from the University Paris-Saclay and R. Brent Tully of the University of Hawaii published the results of a new study in the journal . In the present maps and charts of the features of our local Universe, and also video tours of the wall to the South pole.

This work is the latest part of an ongoing mission, whose main goal is the discovery of our place in the Universe. In the end, we need to know their galactic neighbors and endless voids in the face, because thanks to them you can understand where we are going. The discovery is particularly noteworthy because discovered a giant star cluster all the time remained unnoticed. But what managed to find a scientist?

As it turned out, the new wall incorporates many other cosmographic features: the location of the galaxies or their lack of what researchers have learned in the last few decades. The study is based on measurements of the distances from the 18 000 galaxies up to 600 million light years. For comparison, the most distant objects that we can see quasars and galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang, are from us at a distance about 13 billion light-years.

a Computer model of the wall of the South pole, with more dense areas of matter, shown in red. All the area shown is about 1.3 billion light years; the milky Way galaxy, barely reaching 100,000 light-years across, located in the center of the image

In the expanding Universe, distant galaxies move away from us, just like dots on the inflated balloon; the farther away they are, the faster they are receding from us, according to the ratio, called the Hubble law. This movement from the Ground causes the light from galaxies is shifted to longer, redder wavelengths and lower frequencies, like a receding ambulance siren. Measuring distances between galaxies the researchers were able to distinguish movement caused by the cosmic expansion, from the movement caused by the gravitational distortion.

As a result, astronomers have found that galaxies between the earth and the wall of the South pole is receding from us a little faster than I should have. A galaxy behind the wall move slower than it should be, restrained by the gravitational resistance of the wall. And yet, in cosmological terms, the wall of the South pole is nearby. It is possible to wonder how such a big and not-so-distant building remained unnoticed all these years, but in the expanding Universe, there is always something to see.

void Space

Cosmologists argue that the two largest scales the universe must expand smoothly, and galaxies should be evenly distributed. But in smaller, more local scales the universe looks lumpy and curved. Scientists have discovered that galaxies are collected, often by the thousands in a giant cloud called clusters and they are connected to each other in lace, glowing chains and strands, forming a super-cluster of galaxies, spanning billions of light years. But between them is a vast desert of darkness, called the void.

the Projection wall of the South pole. The plane of the milky Way shown on the map with a shade of grey; what lies behind the Wall hidden from direct observation.

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Anyway, our planet is in the Solar system, which is in the milky Way galaxy. The milky Way, in turn, is part of a small cluster of galaxies called the local group of galaxies, which is located on the edge of the cluster of the virgin conglomerate of several thousand galaxies. In 2014, the researchers suggested that all these features are connected, like part of a giant conglomerate, which he called Laniakea. Read more about what is Laniakea and the galactic void

In 1986 a group of astronomers has discovered that galaxies on a huge strip of sky in the direction of the constellation Centaurus fly much faster than predicted by the Hubble law – as if they are drawn to something that astronomers call the Great Attractor.