Deep astronomy: automated 3D observations of the universe

February 26, 2015

The MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope reveals previously invisible galaxies (credit: ESO)

The MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile recently gave astronomers the best-ever 3D view of the deep Universe.

After staring at the Hubble Deep Field South (HDF-S) region for just 27 hours, the new observations and automated analysis revealed details, distances, motions, spectra, compositions, and other properties of 189 galaxies, more than ten times the number of measurements of distance in this tiny piece of the sky — and did it faster.

Some of the new galaxies studied were in existence when the Universe was less than one billion years old, the astronomers said.


ESO | ESOcast 72 – Looking Deeply into the Universe in 3D