MUSE captures best-ever 3D image of deep universe

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope has one-upped the Hubble Space Telescope, producing the best-ever three-dimensional view of the deep universe while revealing previously invisible objects, ESO officials announced this morning.

The observations were made after the telescope’s MUSE instrument was pointed at the Hubble Deep Field South region of 27 hours, and revealed the distances, motions and other properties of far more galaxies in this region than was previously possible, the agency noted.

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Astronomers created Hubble’s Deep Field and others like it by taking long-exposure pictures of various regions of the sky, and by doing so, they have learned much about the earliest days of the universe. That iconic image was collected over several days in 1995, and was followed two years later by the Hubble Deep Field South, and each provided a vast amount of new knowledge.

However, as the ESO said, there was still much more to learn about the early universe. In order to find out more about the galaxies depicted in the deep field images, scientists had to carefully examine each of them with other instruments – a long and difficult job.

Very encouraging data

Now, however, the MUSE instrument makes it possible for both tasks to be performed more quickly, and at the same time. In fact, one of the first observations the instrument was used for after it was first commissioned in 2014 was an examination Hubble Deep Field South. The results exceeded the team’s expectations, according to principal investigator Roland Bacon.

“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,” Bacon said. “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.”

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In each part of the MUSE view of the Hubble Deep Field South (HDF-S), there is not only a pixel in an image, but also a spectrum that reveals the intensity of the light’s different component colors at that point. There is a total of 90,000 spectra, and they can reveal the distance, makeup and internal motions of hundreds of distant galaxies, according to the ESO.

Those spectra were also able to capture a small number of very faint stars in the Milky Way. In fact, even though the total exposure time was far shorter than the those obtained by Hubble, the MUSE/HDF-S data revealed more than 20 faint objects in this part of the galaxy that the original telescope had missed entirely.

“The greatest excitement came when we found very distant galaxies that were not even visible in the deepest Hubble image,” Bacon said. “After so many years of hard work on the instrument, it was a powerful experience for me to see our dreams becoming reality.”

189 galaxies

Careful analysis of the spectra in the MUSE observations allowed the team to measure how far away 189 galaxies were. Those galaxies ranged from relatively close to some that were seen at a time when the universe was less than one billion years old. The ESO said that the MUSE data increased the number of distance measurements for this region of sky by tenfold.

For those galaxies that are located closer to Earth, MUSE will examine the different properties of different parts of each individual galaxy. Doing so will reveal how those galaxies rotate and how other properties change from one place to another, while also providing new details on how those galaxies evolve throughout the course of cosmic time, the ESO said.

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“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,” Bacon said.

“We will be able to study thousands of galaxies and to discover new extremely faint and distant galaxies,” he added. “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.”

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Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1113341852/muse-captures-best-ever-3d-image-of-deep-universe-022615/