Scientists have used radio telescopes to cut through the haze of the Milky Way, revealing hundreds of previously hidden galaxies beyond it.
In a study published last week in the Astronomical Journal, researchers report that the galaxies - relatively close, in cosmic terms, at just 250 million light-years away - could help explain a gravitational phenomenon known as the Great Attractor.
READ MORE: Einstein was right, but what does the big breakthrough mean?
The area of sky obscured by our own galaxy's mass is called the Zone of Avoidance, which admittedly sounds like a location name from a board game. The ZoA covers about 20 percent of the sky, and scientists know it's full of cosmic objects. But because the dust of the Milky Way obstructs our view (and because the bright stars in the area make it hard to see distant ones) the ZoA seems like a void when you look at it with optical telescopes.
So scientists used Australia's Parkes telescope, which uses radio waves to observe space. They detected 883 galaxies in the ZoA, about a third of which had never been spotted before.