VISTA stares deep into the cosmos: Treasure trove of new infrared data made available to astronomers

www.physorg.com ^ | 03-21-2012 | Staff

[Red Badger]

ESO's VISTA telescope has created the widest deep view of the sky ever made using infrared light. This new picture of an unremarkable patch of sky comes from the UltraVISTA survey and reveals more than 200 000 galaxies. It forms just one part of a huge collection of fully processed images from all the VISTA surveys that is now being made available by ESO to astronomers worldwide. UltraVISTA is a treasure trove that is being used to study distant galaxies in the early Universe as well as for many other science projects.

The telescope has been trained on the same patch of sky repeatedly to slowly accumulate the very dim light of the most distant galaxies. In total more than six thousand separate exposures with a total effective exposure time of 55 hours, taken through five different coloured filters, have been combined to create this picture. This image from the UltraVISTA survey is the deepest infrared view of the sky of its size ever taken.

The VISTA telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile is the world's largest survey telescope and the most powerful infrared survey telescope in existence. Since it started work in 2009 most of its observing time has been devoted to public surveys, some covering large parts of the southern skies and some more focused on small areas. The UltraVISTA survey has been devoted to the COSMOS field, an apparently almost empty patch of sky which has already been extensively studied using other telescopes, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. UltraVISTA is the deepest of the six VISTA surveys by far and reveals the faintest objects.

Data from the VISTA surveys — totalling more than 6 terabytes of images — are now being processed in data centres in the United Kingdom, and in the case of UltraVISTA in France, and are flowing back into the ESO science archive and being made available to astronomers around the world.

At first glance the UltraVISTA image looks unremarkable, a few bright stars and a sprinkling of fainter ones. But in fact almost all of those fainter objects are not stars in the Milky Way, but very remote galaxies, each containing billions of stars. Enlarging the image to fill the screen, and zooming in reveals more and more of them, and the image records more than 200 000 galaxies in total.

[Red Badger]

This view shows a section of the widest deep view of the sky ever taken using infrared light, with a total effective exposure time of 55 hours. It was created by combining more than 6,000 individual images from the VISTA survey telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile. This picture shows a region of the sky known as the COSMOS field in the constellation of Sextans (The Sextant). More than 200,000 galaxies have been identified in this picture. Credit: ESO/UltraVISTA team. Acknowledgement: TERAPIX/CNRS/INSU/CASU

SEE REMARKABLE VIDEO AT LINK!

This video offers a zoom on UltraVISTA — the widest deep view of the sky ever taken using infrared light. The sequence starts with view of most of the sky. We zoom towards the faint constellation of Sextans (The Sextant) and then close in on a much-studied region of sky called the COSMOS field. The final very detailed infrared view comes from the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory. Credit: ESO/A. Fujii/Digitized Sky Survey 2/UltraVISTA teamESO. Music: John Dyson (from the album Moonwind)

[Red Badger]

Space Ping!............

[Dead Corpse]

I love the "boogled" feeling your brain gets when you contemplate numbers that large.

To have even our small place in such a large tapestry is astounding...

[cripplecreek]

Proof of God.

[Red Badger]

Proof BY God.................

[Red Badger]

We are but a speck of dust in the Sahara desert, comparatively speaking........

[Lazamataz]

This photo PISSES ME OFF.

There are clearly, so many planets to strip-mine, so many forests to pollute, so many alien races to be predjudiced and racist against, and subjegated into slavery -- because that's what we in the GOP does!

And I won't live long enough to see ANY of it.

[Dead Corpse]

Or is that “boggled”? Sorry, I was a few light-years away...

[KoRn]

/mark

[Dead Corpse]

A speck of dust on a speck of dust. The usual human associations on the size of scale break down pretty quickly.

[reagan_fanatic]

And you can bet at this very moment, liberals are making plans to support alien same-sex marriages and demonize the hated Republicanoids.

[Dead Corpse]

Not to mention wanting to put in place curbs on warp-emissions to prevent Galactic Warming.

[outofsalt]

Is it just me or does anyone else see a, “constellation” forming a cosmic, LOL ?

[Red Badger]

Yes, I see it!.....LOL!.........