MUSE Gives Best 3D Glimpse into the Universe

The MUSE instrument, part of the European Space Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope, has given astronomers the best 3D glimpse into the deep Universe, according to new research.

This isn't the first time that astronomers have attempted to better understand the Universe - NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took spectacular images over several days back in 1995. And even though these pictures transformed our perception of the content of the Universe when it was young, they did not hold all the answer.

To fill in the gaps, astronomers had to carefully look at each image with other instruments, a difficult and time-consuming job. Now, for the first time, MUSE can do both jobs at once, and far more quickly, providing unprecedented views of the Universe.

"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," Roland Bacon, principal investigator of the MUSE instrument and leader of the research team, said in a news release.

Specifically, MUSE looked at the Hubble Deep Field South (HDF-S) region in the southern sky, and in a period of just 27 hours revealed the distances, motions and other properties of many more galaxies than ever seen before in this stretch of sky.

This achievement is due to the fact that each image doesn't just contain a pixel, but also a spectrum of wavelengths revealing the intensity of the light's different component colors at that point - about 90,000 spectra in total.

This way, the research team measured the distances to 189 galaxies, some of which were relatively close and others that were seen when the Universe was less than one billion years old.

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

The results are described further in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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