Revealing hidden structures in the Zone of Avoidance - A blind MeerKAT H i Survey of the Vela Supercluster

We conducted the MeerKAT Vela Supercluster survey, named Vela, to bridge the gap between the Vela SARAO (South African Radio Astronomy Observatory) MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey (VelaSMGPS,), and optical and near-infrared spectroscopic observations of the Vela Supercluster (hereafter VelaOPT/NIR) at. Covering coordinates from and above, and below the Galactic Plane (GP), we sampled 667 fields spread across an area of. With a beam size of, Vela achieved a sensitivity of at 44.3 velocity resolution over 67 h of observations. We catalogued 719 galaxies, with only 211 (29 per cent) previously documented in the literature, primarily through the H i Parkes Zone of Avoidance survey (HIZOA), Two Micron All-sky Survey Extended Source Catalog (2MASX), and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) data bases. Among these known galaxies, only 66 had optical spectroscopic redshift information. We found marginal differences of less than one channel resolution for all galaxies in common between HIZOA and VelaSMGPS, and a mean difference of between optical and velocities. Combining data from VelaSMGPS, Vela, and VelaOPT/NIR confirmed the connection of the Hydra/Antlia filament across the GP and revealed a previously unknown diagonal wall at a heliocentric velocity range of. Vela reinforces the connection between the first wall at and the inner Zone of Avoidance. The second wall seems to traverse the GP at, where it appears that both walls intersect, jointly covering the velocity range.