A New Instrument Gives the Very Large Telescope an Even Sharper View of the Cosmos By Nancy_A
As you can see, the new instrument shows the galaxy in incredible detail. NGC 1097 is located 45 million light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Fornax. ERIS’s view shows a clearer picture of the gas and dusty ring that lies at the center of the galaxy, with a crisper view of the the bright spots in the surrounding ring, which are stellar nurseries.
First light for ERIS, the Very Large Telescope’s newest infrared instrument. This image has been taken through four different filters by ERIS’s state-of-the-art infrared imager, the Near Infrared Camera System — or NIX. The filters have been represented here by blue, green, red and magenta, where the last one highlights the compact regions in the ring. To put NIX’s resolution in perspective, this image shows, in detail, a portion of the sky less than 0.03% the size of the full Moon.
“We expect not only that ERIS will fulfil its main scientific objectives,” said Harald Kuntschner, ESO’s project scientist for ERIS,“but that due to its versatility it will also be used for a wide variety of other science cases, hopefully leading to new and unexpected results.” ERIS is mounted on the VLT’s Unit Telescope 4 and officials say the upgrade provides some essential improvements to the facility for the coming decade.
“ERIS breathes new life into the fundamental adaptive optics imaging and spectroscopy capability of the VLT,” says Ric Davies, the Principal Investigator of the ERIS consortium and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. “Thanks to the efforts of all those involved in the project over the years, many science projects are now able to benefit from the exquisite resolution and sensitivity the instrument can achieve.
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