A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows some of the brightest and rarest objects in the universe, including monstrous 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 earliest and most distant galaxies in the universe.
Lamia Moula is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto and a leading author of an international team of scientists who created the 3D-DASH study.
“Since its launch more than 30 years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope has led to a renaissance in the study of how galaxies have changed in the last 10 billion years of the universe,” Moula said in a press release. “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 photos that have been digitally stitched together using a technique called Drift and SHift (DASH), which is similar to the way panoramas and photospheres are created on a smartphone. . The final product is eight times larger than Hubble’s normal field of view and uses near infrared wavelength, which is just after what is visible to the human eye, allowing astronomers to observe the earliest galaxies, which are the most remote.
Determining objects like these used to rely on ground-based telescopes, which can see much less detail than those in space. The high-resolution 3D-DASH study will be used to find rare and unique targets for further observation with the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope, such as high-activity black holes and colliding galaxies.
“I’m curious about the monstrous galaxies, which are the most massive in the universe, formed by the merging of other galaxies,” said Moula, who began working on the 3D-DASH project in 2015 as a student. “It was difficult to study these extremely rare events using existing images, which motivated the design of this large study.
As seen from the ground, the 3D-DASH image will cover an area of the sky approximately six times the size of the moon. It is expected to be the largest near-infrared image available to astronomers until the release 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 fine detail in smaller areas and is unlikely to create this kind of wide-angle view.
Hubble’s new image and accompanying study were published earlier this month before the publication in The Astrophysics Journal.
The Hubble Space Telescope has provided humanity with unprecedented flashes of space since its launch in 1990. Operated by NASA in collaboration with the European Space Agency, Hubble is expected to remain in service until the 2030s.
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