CANADA: The European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) new Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument is a bit of a time machine. It is designed to take highly detailed photographs of objects that are very far away in space, which in astronomy means objects from a very long time ago.
The MUSE was officially activated just over a year ago and was the second of the next generation instrument installed on the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile.
MUSE is used to take long exposure images of very small areas of deep space. This long exposure time allows the light from faint objects enough time to make an impression. MUSE then splits each field of view into 24 image segments which are then split into 48 slices or “mini slits”, for a grand total of 1152 mini slits.
Next each of the 48 mini slits is put into a spectrograph which divides the light into 4000 constituent colors. From this MUSE generates a 3D image and reveals the composition, distance and internal motion of very distant galaxies and stars.
After spending 27 hours photographing the Hubble Deep Field South region, the MUSE was able to not only provide more detail than Hubble, but revealed more than 20 objects that were missed by previous surveys.
Prior to MUSE, astronomers had to carefully examine each object with a variety of other instruments. The new instrument can do a more complete job, far more quickly.
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