Astronomy researchers have uncovered the presence of billions of “dust galaxies” that have been hidden in plain sight for far longer than we, as human beings on this planet, can remember.

A new research paper that will be published in an upcoming edition of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal, as documented by United Press International (U.P.I.), indicates that the at-a-distance glowing dust that can be seen in the nighttime sky is actually most likely obscuring multiple far away galaxies that would otherwise be visible in plain sight.

This particular study, “The Multiplicity of 250-μm Herschel Sources in the COSMOS field,” took a look at 360 hidden objects that were detected at 250 micron within the COSMOS field. The Herschel lab documented this collection and was subsequently able to reveal that the sample is almost completely made up of at least two “dust-bright” galaxies that were hidden behind the low resolution images that were caught on film by Herschel.

Scientists previously thought that there was just one far away galaxy hidden behind that cluster.

Humongous whirling gas cloud holds clues to how galaxies form http://t.co/4DQQMtvHsj via @spacedotcom pic.twitter.com/78r70lsK4O — Althea Champagnie (@Champagnie) August 9, 2015

This new theory, U.P.I., was formed by scientists employing a statistical algorithm to determine which galaxies could be responsible for lighting up the massive collections of hot gas that can be viewed in plain sight by observatories worldwide.

This hidden discovery, astronomers now believe, has resulted in a massive over-estimation regarding the rates at which stars are forming, per galaxy, in the universe.

“This is a really interesting result because when we assumed that one galaxy had to be responsible for all of that dust emission, it implied that the galaxy must be forming a tremendous number of new stars,” remarked the study’s author and University of Sussex astrophysicist Jillian Scudder, also per U.P.I.

“Forming that number of stars in a galaxy so early in the universe is quite hard to explain,” she continued, noting how much of the universe continues to be hidden in mystery. “By find that each galaxy is actually two or three galaxies, we’ve dropped the number of stars these galaxies have to be producing by a third.”

In other words, the massive universe hidden just beyond our plain sight may have just gotten all the more massive.

This photograph of a distant spiral galaxy, recorded by the Herschel Space Observatory, provides an example of just a portion of what may lie behind gassy clouds in our solar system. [Image by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images]

The new “hidden in plain sight” discovery was a difficult one to arrive upon, the scientists noted, due to two main limitations: resolution issues, as far infrared scans recorded by the Herschel Space Observatory and other laboratories previously identified many different hidden celestial objects as a single one; and miscalculations, as researchers previously attributed only the galaxy located closest to the glowing dust in their sight as the cause of this phenomenon.

Furthermore, the new Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society study goes on to postulate that a single galaxy is probably only the sole source of such a gas illumination when it is viewable by sight directly in the middle of the gassy image.

All other glowing gas, scientists now believe, is the result of hidden-in-plain-sight, far away galaxies that have caused the radiation that is heating the so-called glowing gas.

This hidden discovery, astronomers now believe, has resulted in a massive over-estimation regarding the rates at which stars are forming, per galaxy, in the universe.

Since the days of astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642), mankind has been obsessed with looking to the skies to determine what lay hidden just beyond plain sight. With this new discovery regarding gas clouds, we are one step closer.[Image by Hulton Archive/Getty Images]

At the very least, however, Scudder views the information that has been uncovered as truly remarkable, and wonders how it could have been hidden all this time.

“Even after being revealed as multiple galaxies, each galaxy is still very bright, and forming a lot of new stars,” she marveled to Science Daily. “The fact that there are several bright galaxies so close to each other on the sky may mean that they’re interacting with each other.”

“This [hidden secret],” she smiled, “might help explain how they got so bright in the first place.”

[Image by Nasa/Getty Images]