What's out there? It's the question that everyone wants answered.

And now with the most powerful telescope of its kind in the world, Australian astronomers may be about to find out, in their search for hidden galaxies.

Even with a radio telescope as powerful as the one at Parkes astronomers can take a long time to search the skies.

Many galaxies beyond our own are faint and give out little light. Some are hidden by the stars and dust of the Milky Way.

Astronomers find hidden galaxies by looking for radio waves that come from cool hydrogen gas, the stuff that stars are made from.

But the problem in the past has been that the radio waves are so weak that it takes a long time to find them.

But now a new multi-beam system, built for the Parkes telescope by CSIRO, means that 13 pieces of sky can be observed at once instead of just one.

"We can now look at parts of the skies and find galaxies that were not known before."

The multi-beam system is carrying out two major projects. Mapping galaxies all over the southern sky and searching for galaxies behind the Milky Way.

And already some amazing discoveries have been made including the ripping apart of small neighbouring galaxies called the Magellenic Clouds, by out own galaxy, the Milky Way.

"Our new observations show that it's extremely likely that in about a billion years, the Magellenic Cloud will collide with our own galaxy and when you have more than a hundred million solar masses of gas colliding with our own galaxy that's a lot of new stars to be made."

Australian astronomers have found 100 new galaxies behind the Milky Way and about 220 new pulsars. Using the new multi-beam system, astronomers have been making new discoveries more than ten times faster than any similar survey.

Who knows what else they may find?