Using sophisticated new technology, the VVVX team were “able to peer through the dust and see even distant galaxies on the other side of the Milky Way,” the observatory said in its announcement.
Among the findings presented at the conference at the Vatican was “a new catalog of nearly 20,000 never seen before galaxies just behind the plane of the Milky Way,” the Vatican said, which allowed astronomers to “discover structures in the universe” normally hidden behind our galaxy.
Among the other findings, the Vatican said, was research on “hyper-velocity stars” in the Milky Way; these stars are “moving at velocities larger than 2 million kms/hr” and are thought to have generated such immense speeds after encounters with the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
As well, scientists shared findings on “a new kind of variable stars in the nuclear disk of the Milky Way”; these objects “have wild changes in brightness” never before observed in other stars. They have been dubbed “dipping giants” by astronomers.
The findings at the October conference “pave the road for a better understanding of the structure of the Milky Way and the formation of all galaxies in general,” the Vatican Observatory said.
Long a major center of astronomical research, the Vatican Observatory’s roots date back to the 16th century, according to the Vatican.