Dozens of heavy galaxies they are decorating a new telescopic achievement: astronomers took the largest infrared image NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has ever produced.
The veteran space observatory looked at the constellation Sextans to see objects within the widely studied COSMOS field like never before. A research team from the University of Toronto in Canada used the high-resolution 3D-DASH survey program to see this area for more information on objects such as giant galaxies that eclipse the Milky Way.
The resulting exploration covers a region about six times the size of the Moon in the sky. You can see an animation showing how they put together several images here.
“I am curious about monster galaxies, which are the most massive in the universe formed by the fusion of other galaxies. How did their structures grow and what drove the changes in their shape? Astronomer Lamiya Mowla, who led the 3-D DASH survey, testified in Monday’s image announcement at the university.
Galactic accidents are “extremely rare events,” making them difficult to study with existing images, Mowla said. His approach is essentially to launch a broad network in hopes of gathering a single observation that advances science.
A piece of sky that the 3D-DASH survey took with the Hubble Space Telescope. Gabe Brammer
How it works – The technique is called Drift And SHift (DASH), which Hubble uses to take eight pictures in each orbit instead of one, “achieving in 250 hours what would have taken 2,000 hours before,” university officials wrote. in the ad.
Officials compare the DASH technique to what a smartphone does when taking a panoramic image. In this style of survey, the observatory takes several photographs that astronomers put together, creating an image eight times larger than Hubble’s standard field of view.
The 3D-DASH program observed these galaxies. Lamiya Mowla
Why does it matter – This type of approach is promising and can be reused in the future. Not even Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, will be able to have such a broad view.
The size of the scene may be surpassed in the future by upcoming projects such as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, but this will not be launched until the end of this decade.
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