Astronomers have caught a glimpse of hundreds of galaxies previously obscured by the gas and dust of the Milky Way.

Published this week in the Astronomical Journal, a new study by an international group of scientists, a part of the night sky that is hidden by our hazy galaxy.

Using the Parkes Radio Telescope, astronomers observed 883 galaxies. About a third of these had never been seen before now.

"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," astronomer Renée Kraan-Korteweg of the University of Cape Town said in a statement. "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."

These newfound sources of mass might explain why our galaxy is hurdling through space.

In a region known as the Great Attractor, a gravitational force is being exerted on the Milky Way. Researchers think these galaxies and galaxy clusters, just 250 million light years away, may account for the source of much of that pull.

“It seems that the lying in a very large region of space,” Lister Staveley-Smith of the University of Western Australia told Smithsonian.com. “Just why such a large overdensity of galaxies lies in that region is a mystery, although cosmological theory does seem to confirm that, occasionally, such large mass concentrations should occur."

The researchers plan to continue peering into space for more hidden structures.

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