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First Pictures From a New Cosmology Machine
By SPACE.com Staff
posted: 07:00 am ET
15 March 2002
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A highly sensitive new survey instrument attached to a telescope in the Southern Hemisphere has come online, showing that the device works and producing several new pictures of distant galaxies.
The European Southern Observatory's Visible Multi-Object Spectrograph (VIMOS) made its first observations, achieving what astronomers call "first light," on Feb. 26 and the images were released Wednesday. Astronomers are billing the device as a "cosmology machine" for its ability to look back in time by seeing into very distant corners of the universe. Among the images were new views of the famous Antennae Galaxies, officially called NGC 4038 and 39. The galaxies collided fairly recently, triggering new star birth that is seen in blue in the new picture. Another picture provides a fresh view of the Crab Nebula, a remnant of a stellar explosion in the year 1054. One photo reveals a relatively nearby cluster of galaxies, all bound together by gravity and just 300 million light-years away. The instrument is designed to observe a very large number of distant, faint objects in the remote universe, with a goal of helping cosmologists understand how the first galaxies formed and evolved. It will be employed to construct a 3-D map of the distant universe from which astronomers hope to learn its large-scale structure, or how clusters of galaxies are situated in relation to other clusters. VIMOS was installed on the 8.2-meter (X-foot) MELIPAL telescope, the third unit of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) facility at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. Other VIMOS data released comes in the form of spectra, in which the instrument breaks down the light from galaxies to gain clues to the chemical makeup of objects, among other things. A single VIMOS exposure will shed light on the stellar and gaseous content of as many as 1,000 galaxies, say the instrument's operators.
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