Astronomers Capture Best Ever 3D View of the Universe with MUSE

Scientists have caught the best ever 3D glimpse of the universe with the help of the MUSE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope. The new observations reveal the distances, motions and other properties of far more galaxies than ever before in this region of the sky.

Astronomers have created many "deep fields" by taking very long exposure pictures of regions of the sky. The most famous of these was the original Hubble Deep Field, which was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over several days. This picture transformed ur understanding of the content of the universe when it was young. This was followed several years later by a similar view in the southern sky, called the Hubble Deep Field South.

In order to find out more about the galaxies in the deep field images, though, the researchers had to carefully look at each one with other instruments. Now, though MUSE can do both jobs at once far more quickly.

"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, said Roland Bacon, principal investigator, in a news release. "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."

The researchers actually found distant galaxies that weren't even visible in the deepest Hubble image. With the MUSE observations, the scientists measured the distances to 189 galaxies. This reveals a bit more about our universe and may help with future studies.

The findings are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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