Hundreds of galaxies have been playing a cosmic game of hide and seek, and astronomers just tagged them “it”.
Using radio telescopes to peer through the dense plane of the Milky Way, researchers have spotted huge galactic gatherings that have long been obscured from view. These galaxies lie a mere 250 million light-years away—and they will only get closer, because they appear to be pulling us towards them at breakneck speed.
Scientists had suspected that galaxies existed in this region, says study co-author Renée C. Kraan-Korteweg of the University of Cape Town, South Africa. But seeing them with traditional telescopes presents a challenge.
“It was not really not that surprising, because the stars and dust in our own Milky Way block a not insignificant part of the sky from our view, in optical light that is,” she says. “So yes, we did expect that many galaxies would be lying behind the plane of the Milky Way, or the so-called Zone of Avoidance. However, we did not know anything about their distribution in space.” (more…)
nd write. He learned much of the great world about him which he had not seen, so that when he became a young man, and a ship finally landed on his shore, he was quite able to slip easily into the civilized world. Picture, however, if he had been plucked from the jungle without this preconditioning and flopped into the civilized world, he might have become a hopeless imbecile through shock and fright. 
