MUSE stares at the Hubble Deep Field South

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 a total of 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. But they also go beyond Hubble and reveal many previously unseen objects.

In this picture the objects that had their distances measured by MUSE are shown with coloured symbols. White star symbols are faint stars in the Milky Way. Everything else is a distant galaxy. Circles show objects that appear in the Hubble imaging of this field, triangles are more than 25 new discoveries in the MUSE data, and cannot be seen in the Hubble picture. Blue objects are comparatively close, green and yellow ones more distant and purple and pink galaxies are seen when the Universe was less than one billion years old. MUSE has measured more than ten times as many distances to distant galaxies in this field than had been achieved up to now.