A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows some of the brightest and rarest objects in the universe, including monster galaxies.
Known as “3D-DASH”, it is also the largest near-infrared image ever made by Hubble and will help astronomers learn more about some of the oldest and most distant galaxies in the universe.
Lamiya Mowla is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto and lead author of the international team of scientists who produced the 3D-DASH study.
“Since its launch more than 30 years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope has led a renaissance in the study of how galaxies have changed in the last 10 billion years of the universe,” Mowla said in a statement. press. “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.”
The 3D-DASH image is actually a mosaic of more than 1,200 individual Hubble snapshots that were digitally joined using a technique called Drift and SHift (DASH), which is similar to creating spherical panoramas and photos on a smartphone. ligent. The final product is eight times larger than Hubble’s normal field of view and uses the near-infrared wavelength, which is just beyond what is visible to the human eye, allowing astronomers to observe galaxies. earlier ones that are further away.
The location of objects like these was previously based on terrestrial telescopes, which can see much less detail than those in space. The high-resolution 3D-DASH survey will be used to find rare and unique targets for later observation with the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope, such as highly active black holes and colliding galaxies.
“I’m curious about monster galaxies, which are the most massive in the universe formed by the fusion of other galaxies,” said Mowla, who began working on the 3D-DASH project in 2015 as a graduate student. “It was difficult to study these extremely rare events using existing images, which is what motivated the design of this large survey.”
As seen from Earth, the 3D-DASH image would cover an area of the sky about six times the size of the moon. It is expected to be the largest near-infrared image available to astronomers until the launch of next-generation telescopes such as the European Space Agency’s Euclid and NASA’s Roman Space Telescope. The new James Webb telescope is designed to capture detail even in smaller areas and is unlikely to produce this type of wide-angle view.
The new Hubble image and accompanying study were published earlier this month before publication in The Astrophysics Journal.
The Hubble Space Telescope has provided humanity with unprecedented views of the cosmos since its launch in 1990. Operated by NASA in cooperation with the European Space Agency, Hubble is expected to remain in service for decades. of 2030.