The MUSE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope has captured the most spectacular 3-D view of the universe ever seen by scientists.
The telescope looked at the Hubble Deep Field South (HDF-S) region for 27 hours, allowing it to capture the revealing image, the Eastern Southern Observatory (ESO) reported. The new long-exposure image reveals the distances and motions of distant galaxies as well as previously-invisible objects.
"After just a few hours of observations at the telescope, we had a quick look at the data and found many galaxies -- it was very encouraging. And when we got back to Europe we started exploring the data in more detail. It was like fishing in deep water and each new catch generated a lot of excitement and discussion of the species we were finding," said Roland Bacon, principal investigator of the MUSE instrument and leader of the commissioning team.
Each tiny region of the MUSE view of HDF-S reveals a spectrum of the intensity of light's different components of colors (about 90,000 spectra overall). This allows researchers to estimate the compositions and internal motions of far-off galaxies. The image also picked up 20 faint objects in a patch of sky that had not been spotted by previous Hubble images.
"The greatest excitement came when we found very distant galaxies that were not even visible in the deepest Hubble image. After so many years of hard work on the instrument, it was a powerful experience for me to see our dreams becoming reality," Bacon said.
The image allowed the research team to measure the distances to 189 galaxies, which is more than 10 times the number of measurements that previously existed for this region of the sky.
"Now that we have demonstrated MUSE's unique capabilities for exploring the deep Universe, we are going to look at other deep fields, such as the Hubble Ultra Deep field. We will be able to study thousands of galaxies and to discover new extremely faint and distant galaxies. These small infant galaxies, seen as they were more than 10 billion years in the past, gradually grew up to become galaxies like the Milky Way that we see today," Bacon concluded.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
