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Hundreds of hidden nearby galaxies have been studied for the first time, shedding light on a mysterious gravitational anomaly dubbed the Great Attractor. Despite being just 250 million light years from Earth—very close in astronomical terms—the new galaxies had been hidden from view until now by our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Using CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope equipped with an innovative receiver, an international team of scientists were able to see through the stars and dust of the Milky Way, into a previously unexplored region of space. The discovery may help to explain the Great Attractor region, which appears to be drawing the Milky Way and hundreds of thousands of other galaxies towards it with a gravitational force equivalent to a million billion Suns. the team found 883 galaxies, a third of which had never been seen before. Scientists have been trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious Great Attractor since major deviations from universal expansion were first discovered in the 1970s and 1980s. Astronomers don't actually understand what's causing this gravitational acceleration on the Milky Way or where it's coming from. They know that in this region there are a few very large collections of galaxies we call clusters or superclusters, and our whole Milky Way is moving towards them at more than two million kilometres per hour. The research identified several new structures that could help to explain the movement of the Milky Way, including three galaxy concentrations (named NW1, NW2 and NW3) and two new clusters (named CW1 and CW2). Scientists have used a range of techniques but only radio observations have really succeeded in allowing us to see through the thickest foreground layer of dust and stars. An average galaxy contains 100 billion stars, so finding hundreds of new galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way points to a lot of mass we didn't know about until now. The study involved researchers from Australia, South Africa, the US and the Netherlands, and was published today in the Astronomical Journal. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-02-scientists-hidden-galaxies-milky.html#jCp Astronomical Journal http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-6256/151/3/52 http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2016/02/solved-the-great-attractor-mystery-hundreds-of-previously-unknown-galaxies-discovered-hidden-behind-.html Astronomers In Quest To Solve ‘Great Attractor’ Mystery Discover Hundreds Of Galaxies Hiding In Plain Sight http://www.ibtimes.com/astronomers-quest-solve-great-attractor-mystery-discover-hundreds-galaxies-hiding-2301668 Great Attractor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Attractor Clips credit: ESO, ESA/HUBBLE & NASA Images credit: ICRAR, IPAC/Caltech, by Thomas Jarrett, Nature.com Music credit: YouTube Audio Library Cry - Vibe Tracks