A supermassive black hole billions of times bigger than our sun. NASA/JPL-Caltech The Milky Way and hundreds of galaxies surrounding it are being drawn toward a mysterious force scientists call the "Great Attractor".

And it took the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's (CSIRO) Parkes telescope to see them.

The force was first revealed back in the 1970s, when it was discovered that the Milky Way was one of hundreds of galaxies deviating from the "universe is expanding" model.

But a new receiver on the radio telescope has enabled the team to see more clearly through the fog of stars and dust crowding the outer plane of the Milky Way, where they found 883 galaxies. It's so crowded out there that it's even got a name: the "Zone of Avoidance".

A third of the galaxies had never been seen before, according to a study published on Tuesday in Astronomical Journal, and their discovery has made the trail toward the Great Attractor a little clearer.

"The Milky Way is very beautiful, of course, and it's very interesting to study our own galaxy, but it completely blocks out the view of the more distant galaxies behind it," Professor Lister Staveley-Smith, from The University of Western Australia, said.

In particular, the discovery of three galaxy concentrations — NW1, NW2, and NW3 — and two new clusters, CW1 and CW2, will help astronomers understand what the Great Attractor is and why it's pulling us toward it at an estimated 2 million kilometres per hour.

All that scientists understand about the Great Attractor is that it features "a few very large collections of galaxies we call clusters or superclusters", Staveley-Smith said.

Now that a new multi-beam system on the Parkes telescope has enabled the sky to be mapped "13 times faster", Dr Bärbel Koribalski, from CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, said discoveries would come at a much greater rate.

But even the new attachment is small compared to when results start coming in from WALLABY — the Widefield ASKAP L-Band Legacy All-sky Blind Survey — a major project under way at the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder in midwest Western Australia.

With the ability to spot more than half a million galaxies, Koribalski told News.Com.au that she hopes the trail toward the Great Attractor will suddenly become clearer.