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Astronomers No Longer Need To Avoid the "Zone of Avoidance"
An anonymous reader writes: If you want to look out into the Universe, all you need to do is gather the light it gives off. Unless, of course, there's something in the way. For about 20% of the sky, that's exactly the story. In our own Milky Way galaxy, the neutral gas and dust block most of the visible light everywhere we look, preventing us from observing the Universe beyond. However, although the gas and dust might block visible light, longer wavelengths like radio and infrared can pass right through. Recently NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission mapped the entire sky in the infrared, including the entire galactic plane. It not only found many background galaxies, but it gave us a new window into what's possible. Perhaps, with future missions, we'll discover the cause of the "great attractor" phenomenon after all.
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its bears remembering that while the zone of avoidance may be removed from concern, other zones are still legitimately relevant to the night sky. among them:
the zone of unease: rather quite uncomfortable. best not even to mention it.
the zone of overbearing parenting: we just think it would be better for you to not spend to much time in it. ok? have we made ourselves clear?
Autozone: not terrible unless youre after something important and in which case youll spend a very long time indeed searching until you either run out of patience or buy new wiper blades.
the zone: actually a mis-calibration. some orion telescopes will erroneously track to this small strip club in hollywood, california. this setting however can observe most partial solar eclipses visible as well from Germany's Neumayer Station, so, not a total loss...
Good people go to bed earlier.
It's just a name. Like the "Death Zone" or the "Zone of No Return". All the zones have names like that in the Galaxy of Terror.