Eli5: is it possible to know if there are galaxies hidden behind galaxies closer to us? And if yes, can we look at them with current technologies?
In: Planetary Science
The Simplest answer is: Sometimes.
The scale of the universe means it’s all but certain that (for example) there are galaxies on the other side of Andromeda that we can’t see.
However galaxies are heavy things, heavy enough to bend space around them, so that sometimes the light from a galaxy on the far side get’s bent around the foreground galaxy and we can still see it. It’s called gravitational lensing, and this sometimes let’s us see things we ordinarily wouldn’t be able to.
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