Astronomers have developed a new three-dimensional map of 1 million remote galaxies that were previously obscured by the Magellanic Clouds.

Scientists have created the best-ever simulation of a billion light-years of space as a giant wall of 1 million galaxies obscured by the Milky Way’s neighboring dwarf galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

The Magellanic Clouds are irregular formed galaxies that can be seen from the region of the sky visible from the southern hemisphere. However, because of, these dwarf galaxies are bright and large in the night sky; the Milky Way’s companions prevent one from viewing many other much farther galaxies.

Thus there is one more area of heaven, where billions of galaxies of the universe are observed, which is excluded from observation. ‘The Magellanic Clouds are two gorgeous galaxies that orbit ours but, along with other nearby bodies, they obstruct some of the view towards objects located more distant,’ commented one of the creators of the map, the University of Keele’s Jessica Craig. “Our work goes toward eradicating that and at the same time aiding in completing the blank areas in the universe map.

To counter this problem, Craig and her team decided to photograph the Magellanic Clouds with sufficient clarity that they can discern spaces in between the stars that make up these galaxies. For these purposes, the scientists employed the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy also known as VISTA situated at Paranal Observatory in Chile.

However, these progressively distant ‘hidden’ galaxies are especially hard to observe because the material in the Magellanic Clouds distort light making galaxies look less luminous and with a redshift then they really are. To counter this effect, the scientists used a tool known as the Galactic Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder Survey (GASKAP), which assists in viewing beyond the dust in space between planets including galaxies.

From the GASKAP data, the scientists were able to depict the state of the gas and dust in the Magellanic Clouds which gave the details on the extent of the ‘reddening effect’ the elements have to the galaxies behind them. Because of the enormous number of stars in the Magellanic Cloud pictures, one cannot differentiate between distant and nearby galaxies with the naked eyes.

However, due to the relative motion of stars and the fact that distant galaxies do not move, the team was recently able to unambiguously assign data from the Gaia star mapper to each of the light sources.

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