NEW YORK: According to a European Southern Observatory (ESO) statement, the Very Large Telescope has carried out unprecedented observations that enable the most detailed three-dimensional view of a small sector of the distant Universe.
The observations were gathered by the telescope’s MUSE instrument, focused on a region known as the Hubble Deep Field South. Deep field images are generated through long exposures of small regions of the sky, providing data on the most distance and earliest parts of the cosmos.
Over several days in 1995, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured the iconic Hubble Deep Field. Two years later, Hubble produced a similar image of the southern sky, dubbed the Hubble Deep Field South. Though amazing and elucidating, the Hubble deep field images could not reveal all the galaxies present in the field of view.
MUSE, however, is able to discover those additional galaxies and provide more data on the entire field of view. After a mere 27 hours of observation, MUSE had amassed data on the distances, motions, and compositions of galaxies in the deep field, and uncovered over 20 galaxies so distant and so faint that they were previously invisible.
MUSE gathered around 90,000 light spectra – the different component colors of light at each pixel in the image. This information was used to detect previously unrecognized objects and determine the distances to 189 galaxies in the field. Some of those galaxies were comparatively nearby, while others are so distant that they were observed as they were when the Universe was less than a billion years old.
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