The discovery may help to explain the mysterious gravitational anomaly dubbed the Great Attractor, that appears to be drawing the Milky Way and hundreds of thousands of other galaxies towards it with a gravitational force equivalent to a million billion Suns.
Using Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's (CSIRO) Parkes radio telescope in Australia equipped with an innovative receiver, scientists were able to see through the stars and dust of the Milky Way, into a previously unexplored region of space.
Scientists have been trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious Great Attractor since major deviations from universal expansion were first discovered in the 1970s and 1980s, said Staveley-Smith.
"We don't actually understand what's causing this gravitational acceleration on the Milky Way or where it's coming from," he said.
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"We know that in this region there are a few very large collections of galaxies we call clusters or superclusters, and our whole Milky Way is moving towards them at more than two million kilometres per hour," he said.
Astronomers have been trying to map the galaxy distribution hidden behind the Milky Way for decades.
"We've used a range of techniques but only radio observations have really succeeded in allowing us to see through the thickest foreground layer of dust and stars," said Renee Kraan-Korteweg, a professor at University of Cape Town, in South Africa.
"An average galaxy contains 100 billion stars, so finding hundreds of new galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way points to a lot of mass we didn't know about until now," she said.