Astronomers have finally mapped out a mysterious galactic "supercluster" that has been almost completely hidden from Earth since it was discovered 10 years ago. The results reveal that the structure is far larger than we realized, and it now ranks among some of the most massive objects in the known universe.
The Vela Supercluster is a collection of at least 20 galaxy clusters, each of which contains hundreds or thousands of galaxies, all gravitationally bound into a single entity. Despite its immense size, the supercluster was just discovered in 2016 because of its location: It lies around 800 million light-years from Earth within a region that experts call the "Zone of Avoidance" — the part of the night sky where we see the Milky Way, which is so full of stars and dust that it's almost impossible to view anything behind it.
