MUSE view of 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.

The three-dimensional MUSE data can be viewed as a stack of thousands of individual images at different wavelengths spreading from the blue part of the spectrum far into the near-infrared. Here they are viewed one after each other, starting in the blue. Some comparatively nearby galaxies are selected and their rotation is visible  — parts of the galaxy on one side appear first (because they are moving towards the viewer and hence blue-shifted) and then the other side appears (receding and redshifted).