The newest instrument installed on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, a spectrograph called MOONS, has made its first observation, the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon announced.
The university said MOONS can observe a thousand astronomical objects at the same time, a capability it described as decisive for understanding how galaxies form.
Portuguese scientists on the project
Scientists from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon are working on the MOONS project, as are researchers from Portugal's Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences.
The Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences is a Portuguese research body that brings together astronomers from several universities and regularly partners with European observatories on instrument development and data analysis.
What the MOONS instrument does
MOONS is a multi-object spectrograph, a type of instrument that splits the light collected from many objects into their component wavelengths at once, rather than one at a time. Astronomers use these spectra to work out how far away a galaxy or star is, what it is made of and how it is moving.
Being able to process a thousand objects simultaneously allows researchers to build up much larger surveys of the sky in far less time than earlier instruments required, which is why the university highlighted the capability as significant for studying the origins of galaxies.
About the VLT telescope
The VLT is operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), an intergovernmental research organisation backed by member states across Europe. It is based at the Paranal Observatory, high in Chile's Atacama Desert, a site chosen for its dark skies and dry, stable air, which make it one of the best locations on Earth for observing the night sky.
The facility is made up of four large Unit Telescopes, each with an 8.2-metre mirror, along with smaller auxiliary telescopes that can work together. It has been used for decades by astronomers worldwide to study distant galaxies, exoplanets and other cosmic phenomena, and the addition of MOONS extends that work by letting scientists gather far more data from a single observing run.
