The widest and deepest view of the sky ever made using infrared light has been produced by the European Southern Observatory’s Vista telescope.The image contains more than 200,000 galaxies, with tens of thousands of them previously unknown to astronomers.
The telescope is stationed at the ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile and is the most powerful infrared survey telescope in existence.
It 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 6,000 separate exposures with a total effective exposure time of 55 hours, taken through five different coloured filters, have been combined to create this picture.
What’s more, the area of sky that the telescope has been trained on looks unremarkable to the naked eye - but such is the power of the telescope that a treasure trove of objects has been revealed. Read More
