Astronomers from 3D-Drift And SHift (3D-DASH) have released the largest close-up infrared image ever made by NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
A piece of sky depicted by the 3D-DASH study. Image credit: Mowla et al., Doi: 10.3847 / 1538-4357 / ac71af.
3D-DASH provides astronomers with a comprehensive near-infrared study of the entire COSMOS field, one of the richest data fields for extragalactic research beyond the Milky Way.
It covers a total area almost six times the size of the Moon in the sky seen from Earth.
This record is likely to remain intact from Hubble’s successor, NASA’s / ESA / CSA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which was instead designed for sensitive close-ups to capture fine detail in a small area.
It is the largest near-infrared image of the sky 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 studying how galaxies have changed in the last 10 billion years of the universe,” said Dr. Lamia Moula, an astronomer at the 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 collision and merging into one.
“I’m curious about the monstrous galaxies, which are the most massive in the universe, formed by the merging of other galaxies,” said Dr. Maula.
“How did their structures grow and what caused the changes in their shape?”
“It was difficult to study these extremely rare events using existing images, which motivated the design of this large study.
These images show the most massive star-forming galaxies in the 3D-DASH field. The galaxies are sorted by their redshift, which is shown in the upper left corner. Each mark is 40,000 x 40,000 parsecs. Image credit: Mowla et al., Doi: 10.3847 / 1538-4357 / ac71af.
To depict such a vast part of the sky, Dr. Moula and his 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 images, which are then combined into a single basic mosaic, similar to capturing a panoramic image on a smartphone.
It also makes images faster than typical techniques, taking eight images in Hubble’s orbit instead of one, achieving in 250 hours what it would have taken in 2000 hours.
“3D-DASH adds a new layer of unique observations to the COSMOS field and is also a step towards space exploration over the next decade,” said Dr. Ivelina Momcheva, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy.
“This gives us a brief overview 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 most extensive study of the Hubble Space Telescope near the infrared spectrum. ApJ, in print; doi: 10.3847 / 1538-4357 / ac71af
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