Celestial Rendezvous With the Muse, Enabled by New Observatory Instrument
A new instrument at the Paranal Observatory in Chile produces detailed, colour-spectrum images of celestial objects. Scientists expect that the instrument, called MUSE, will provide evidence of a network of gas filament structures that has been postulated to exist in space.
Over the past 10 years, the latest instrument at the Paranal Observatory of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile has undergone planning and construction. As reported by the ESO, in recent weeks the instrument known as MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) has been put into operation and successfully tested. “The instrument increases the light sensitivity and spatial resolution of astronomical observations. Now we can use shorter exposure times to observe even extremely faint light sources in very distant parts of the universe,” says Marcella Carollo, Professor of Astrophysics at the Institute for Astronomy at ETH Zurich, one of seven European partners involved in the MUSE project. The consortium is led by the University of Lyon’s Centre de recherche astrophysique.
The heart of the Paranal Observatory is made up of four giant reflector telescopes. At more than eight metres in diameter, they are among the largest in the world. The new instrument consisting of 24 integral field spectrographs has been added to one of the telescopes. With these optical instruments, the incident light can be broken up into its colour spectrum and measured, making it possible to generate images of the universe in which the entire colour spectrum is detected for each of the 90,000 points of the two-dimensional image.
Clues about material composition
The additional information provided by the colour spectrum means the chemical and physical composition of celestial objects can be identified. And as it’s possible to obtain colour spectra even for faint or crowded objects thanks to MUSE, scientists are able to observe events in the early universe, such as the formation of galaxies and their supermassive black holes.
With the help of MUSE, researchers at the Institute of Astronomy will be able to study the most remote parts of the observable universe and search for previously undiscovered galaxies. “We also hope the instrument will allow us to observe what we call the cosmic web,” says Simon Lilly, Professor of Experimental Astrophysics. This is a massive, web-like structure of gas filaments that, according to the astrophysical theory, spans the universe but which has yet to be demonstrated directly.
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