Astronomers from Durham University have released a new map of the night sky featuring 4.4 million galaxies. Nearly one million of the space objects they captured have never been seen before. The researchers used the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) European radio telescope to collect 3,500 hours worth of visual data from billions of light years away, according to CBS News.

“We’ve opened the door to new discoveries with this project, and future work will follow up these new discoveries in even more detail with techniques, which we work on here at Durham as part of the LOFAR-UK collaboration, to post-process the data with 20 times better resolution,” Durham University scientist Dr. Leah Morabito said.

The innovative LOFAR telescope uses the lowest possible radio frequencies to observe about a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere’s sky and record it in detail. The device is operated by ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. Radio astronomy allows scientists to detect objects otherwise invisible to the naked eye. This includes black holes and other objects that cannot be seen with visible light waves.

Among the scientists’ remarkable findings were images of galaxy collisions and flaring stars in the Milky Way. Many of the galaxies identified have large black holes or are creating new stars at record speeds.

“Each time we create a map our screens are filled with new discoveries and objects that have never before been seen by human eyes,” astronomer Timothy Shimwell of ASTRON and Leiden University said in a statement. “This release is only 27% of the entire survey and we anticipate it will lead to many more scientific breakthroughs in the future.”