Scientists have discovered a huge “extragalactic structure” hidden behind the Milky Way in a mysterious area of the sky known as the “zone of avoidance” because it is obscured by our own galaxy’s opaque bulge, according to a new preprint study.The star stuff that makes up our galaxy, the Milky Way, is distributed inside a thin plane that orbits around a central bulge that contains a supermassive black hole.Now, a team led by Daniela Galdeano, an astronomer at the National University of San Juan in Argentina, report the discovery of “ a new galaxy cluster, VVVGCl-B J181435-381432, behind the Milky Way bulge,” which helps to complete “the picture of the large scale structure in this still little explored area of the sky,” according to a study posted this week on the preprint server arxiv.“For many years, the ZoA had a lack of information, but now with new studies we could cover a little region of the sky, and in the near future, a bigger region with data.”“It is incredibly difficult to find galaxies behind the galactic plane, because of the high density of stars and also the obscuration by dust along the line of sight, and this looked like one of the most prominent candidates,” noted Dante Minniti, director of the Institute of Astrophysics at Andrés Bello National University in Chile and a co-author of the study, in another email to Motherboard.“We suspected the presence of structure,” he added, “but since this was a ‘blind region’ before, this discovery of a new galaxy cluster was a nice confirmation.”Galdeano and her colleagues were able to spot this cluster within the ZoA using the VVV Survey, a project that scans the Milky Way bulge at infrared wavelengths using the European Southern Observatory’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) in Paranal, Chile."