Astronomers in 3D-Drift And SHift (3D-DASH) have released the largest near-infrared image ever made by NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
A piece of sky captured by the 3D-DASH survey. Image credit: Mowla et al., Doi: 10.3847 / 1538-4357 / ac71af.
3D-DASH offers astronomers a complete near-infrared survey of the entire COSMOS field, one of the richest data fields for extragalactic studies beyond the Milky Way.
It covers a total area almost six times the size of the Moon in the sky as seen from Earth.
This record is likely to be kept intact by Hubble’s successor, NASA / ESA / CSA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is built for sensitive, close-up images to capture details of a small area.
It is the largest near-infrared sky image available to astronomers until the launch of the next generation of telescopes in the next decade, such as the Roman space telescope Nancy Grace and Euclid.
“Since its launch more than 30 years ago, Hubble has led a renaissance in the study of how galaxies have changed in the last 10 billion years of the universe,” said Dr. Lamiya Mowla, an astronomer at Dunlap Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto.
“The 3D-DASH program expands Hubble’s legacy into wide-area imagery so we can begin to unravel the mysteries of galaxies beyond our own.”
3D-DASH will help identify unique phenomena such as the most massive galaxies in the Universe, highly active black holes, and galaxies on the verge of colliding and merging into one.
“I’m curious about monster galaxies, which are the most massive in the universe formed by the fusion of other galaxies,” Dr. Mowla said.
“How did their structures grow and what drove the changes in their shape?”
“It was difficult to study these extremely rare events using existing images, which is what motivated the design of this large survey.”
These images show the most massive star-forming galaxies in the 3D-DASH field. The galaxies are sorted by their redshift, which are shown in the upper left corner. Each stamp is 40,000 x 40,000 parsecs. Image credit: Mowla et al., Doi: 10.3847 / 1538-4357 / ac71af.
To imagine such an expansive patch of sky, Dr. Mowla and her colleagues used a new Hubble technique known as Drift And SHift (DASH).
DASH creates an image that is eight times larger than Hubble’s standard field of view by capturing multiple photographs that are then merged into a master mosaic, similar to making a panoramic image with a smartphone.
It also takes images faster than the typical technique, capturing eight images per Hubble orbit instead of one image, achieving in 250 hours what would have taken 2,000 hours before.
“3D-DASH adds a new layer of unique observations to the COSMOS field and is also a stepping stone to space surveys for the next decade,” said Dr. Ivelina Momcheva, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.
“It gives us a glimpse of future scientific discoveries and allows us to develop new techniques for analyzing these large data sets.”
The team’s paper will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.
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Lamiya A. Mowla et al. 2022. 3D-DASH: The Largest Survey of the Hubble Space Telescope in Near Infrared. ApJ, in press; doi: 10.3847 / 1538-4357 / ac71af