Our Milky Way's 'Zone of Avoidance' holds a galaxy supercluster with 30,000 trillion times the sun's mass

Key Points:

• The Vela Supercluster, a massive structure composed of over 20 galaxy clusters located about 870 million light-years away, is larger and more massive than previously thought, influencing the motion of galaxies in our cosmic neighborhood.
• Hidden behind the Milky Way's dusty plane in the Zone of Avoidance, the supercluster was studied using data from the CosmicFlows catalogue, the Southern African Large Optical Telescope (SALT), and the MeerKAT radio telescope, which can detect galaxies through dust via radio waves.
• Researchers found the Vela Supercluster contains approximately 33,800 trillion solar masses of material across a volume about 300 million light-years wide, making its gravitational pull stronger than even the Great Attractor and comparable to the Shapley Supercluster.
• The discovery clarifies the source of excess cosmic flows—peculiar galaxy motions influenced by gravity over vast distances—and helps complete the map of the nearby universe by revealing a major gravitational player previously hidden behind our galaxy.
• The team nicknamed the supercluster "Vela-Banzi," meaning "revealing widely" in isiXhosa, highlighting its role in uncovering previously obscured cosmic structures.