Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2015

SPACE CHRONICLES original Hubble Deep Field, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Tele- scope over several days in late 1995. This spectacular and iconic picture rapidly transformed our understand- ing of the content of the Universe when it was young. It was followed two years later by a similar view in the southern sky — the Hubble Deep Field South. But these images did not hold all the answers — to find out more about the galaxies in the deep field images, astronomers had to care- fully look at each one with other in- struments, a difficult and time-con- suming job. But now, for the first time, the new MUSE instrument can do both jobs at once — and far more quickly. One of the first observa- tions using MUSE after it was com- T he MUSE in- strument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope has given astronomers the best ever three-dimen- sional view of the deep Uni- verse. After staring at the Hubble Deep Field South re- gion for a total of 27 hours the new observa- tions reveal the distances, mo- tions and other properties of far more gala- xies than ever before in this tiny piece of the sky. But they also go beyond Hubble and reveal many previou- sly unseen ob- jects. In this picture the ob- jects that had their distances measured by MUSE are shown with coloured symbols. White star symbols are faint stars in the Milky Way. Everything else is a distant galaxy. Circles show objects that appear in the Hubble imaging of this field, triangles are more than 25 new discoveries in the MUSE data, and cannot be seen in the Hubble picture. Blue objects are comparatively close, green and yellow ones more distant and purple and pink galaxies are seen when the Universe was less than one billion years old. MUSE has measured more than ten times as many distances to distant galaxies in this field than had been achieved up to now. [ESO/MUSE consortium/R. Bacon]