Petr Rana, of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, who published the first-ever map of the most distant galaxies in 2009 and the most distant black holes in 2010, said: “We are in an era when astronomy is becoming more and more important in society and our daily lives, and we cannot afford to stop now. It would be a disaster if we stopped.

“It is a time of huge strides in understanding the universe and of our own lives, and of all of our discoveries. The sky is our oyster, it is time for us to make plans.”

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Dr James Pearson, head of research at the ESO, said: “This map is truly breathtaking: we’ve seen for the first time galaxies and black holes in the very earliest years of the universe. It’s like getting a rare glimpse into a time when the universe was still forming stars and galaxies from little pockets of gas, dust and dust clouds.

“These new insights into galaxies and black holes are vital to our understanding of the formation of the universe and how it works.”

The data was collected at distances ranging from a few thousand million to 1.3 billion light years.

The discovery came from the work of Gábor Rácz from the University of Oxford, who was among the first scientists to take on the problem of trying to identify galaxies and black holes in a tiny amount of data.

A map of the most distant galaxies will be released in the month of February at an event.

Dr Rácz, who discovered the first galaxies and black holes that the universe exploded into and the first galaxies ever seen to be in orbit with black holes, said: “Gábor was kind enough to let his technique to identify objects in the very early universe for the first time be used in the paper. This was something of a breakthrough, a major scientific milestone for what we’re doing.”

Dr Rácz added: “The way you see these galaxies and black holes is by scanning the entire sky in a specific wavelength band – so there has to be a way in which the data is analysed when you get out of one