Zooming in on one of the KiDS survey regions

This video shows the location of one of the five KiDS regions that were surveyed by the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. This region (known as G12) covers a large area of sky along the celestial equator in the constellations of Leo (The Lion) and Virgo (The Virgin). The final colour dark matter density image reveals an expansive web of dense (light) and empty (dark) regions. This image reconstruction was made by analysing the light collected from over three million distant galaxies more than 6 billion light-years away.