Dozens of strong galaxies adorn a new telescopic achievement: astronomers have captured the largest infrared image that NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has ever produced.
The Veterans Space Observatory peered into the constellation Sextan to see objects within the in-depth study of the COSMOS field as never before. A research team from the University of Toronto in Canada is using the 3D-DASH high-resolution research program to explore this area to learn more about objects such as huge galaxies that go far beyond the Milky Way.
The resulting scan covers a region approximately six times the size of the moon in the sky. Here you can watch an animation showing how they combined several images.
“I’m curious about the monstrous galaxies, which are the most massive in the universe, formed by the merging of other galaxies. How have their structures grown and what has changed their shape? ”Astronomer Lamiya Mowla, who is leading the 3-D DASH study, said in a statement Monday.
Galactic catastrophes are “extremely rare events”, making them difficult to study with existing images, Maula said. Their approach is essentially to cast a wide net in the hope of gathering a unique observation that drives science.
A piece of the sky that the 3D-DASH study made 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 just one, “achieving in 250 hours what it would have taken 2,000 hours before,” university officials said in a statement.
Officials compare the DASH technique to what the smartphone does when taking a panoramic photo. In this style of research, the observatory takes multiple images, which astronomers then combine to create an image eight times larger than Hubble’s standard field of view.
The 3D-DASH program monitors these galaxies. Lamia Maula
Why it matters – This type of approach is promising and may be used again in the future. Even Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, will not be able to take such a broad view.
The size of the stage may be surpassed in the future by upcoming projects such as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, but it will not be launched until later this decade.
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