Looking Deeply into the Universe in 3D, MUSE goes beyond Hubble

The MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope has given astronomers the best ever three-dimensional view of the deep Universe. After staring at the Hubble Deep Field South region for only 27 hours, the new observations reveal the distances, motions and other properties of far more galaxies than ever before in this tiny piece of the sky. They also go beyond Hubble and reveal previously invisible objects.

One of the first observations using MUSE after it was commissioned on the VLT in 2014 was a long hard look at the Hubble Deep Field South (HDF-S). The results exceeded expectations.

After just a few hours of observations at the telescope, we had a quick look at the data and found many galaxies — it was very encouraging. And when we got back to Europe we started exploring the data in more detail. It was like fishing in deep water and each new catch generated a lot of excitement and discussion of the species we were finding
explained Roland Bacon (Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon) principal investigator of the MUSE instrument and leader of the commissioning team.

• The MUSE 3D view of the Hubble Deep Field South, R. Bacon et al., Astronomy & Astrophysics
• ESO Press Release