Ultra Vista is a hidden treasure

The VISTA telescope of ESO has provided astronomers with the deepest image of the sky with ever larger field width created using infrared light. This new image of a small part of the sky, which may go unrecognized, the survey comes, UltraVista and reveals more than 200,000 galaxies. It's just a part of a large collection of images of all the polls VISTA, fully processed, now THAT is making available to astronomers around the world. UltraVista is a hidden treasure that is being used to study distant galaxies in the early universe as well as many other scientific projects. 

The ESO VISTA telescope has observed the same piece of sky repeatedly to slowly build up the faint light from distant galaxies.  All over six thousand different exposures with a total effective exposure time of 55 hours, taken through five different filters. This image of the survey is UltraVista infrared vision of heaven deepest ever obtained its size. 

The ESO VISTA telescope located at Parental Observatory in Chile, is the largest survey telescope in the world and, so far, the most powerful infrared surveys. Since the beginning of its operation in 2009 most of its observing time is dedicated to public polls, some covering large parts of the southern skies and other focused on smaller parts. 

The survey has been dedicated to UltraVista COSMOS field, some of the most apparently empty sky that has been studied in depth using other telescopes, including Hubble Space Telescope (NASA / ESA). UltraVista is by far the deepest of the six polls VISTA and reveals the faintest objects in the area. 

Are currently processing data from surveys of VISTA - a total of more than 6 terabytes of images-in data analysis centers around Europe, returning to the file data from ESO to make them available to astronomers around the world. 

At first glance, the image of UltraVista not seem relevant, are a few bright stars and scattered, some weaker. But in reality, most of these fainter objects are not stars in the Milky Way, but very distant galaxies, each containing one of them, billions of stars. Extending the full screen, and getting closer, reveal numerous galaxies, the image recorded in total, more than 200,000 galaxies. 

Expanding the universe shifts the light from distant objects toward longer wavelengths. For the starlight from distant galaxies we can see, this means that most of the light falls in the infrared part of the spectrum when it comes to Earth. VISTA, being a wide-field infrared telescope, is an ideal instrument to discover distant galaxies in the early universe. Studying galaxies in the redshirted light at increasing distances, astronomers can also analyze how they formed and how galaxies evolve over cosmic history. 

Closer inspection of the image reveals many objects scattered among the galaxies reddish cream color, larger-these are, for the most part, very remote galaxies seen when the Universe was only a small fraction of its present age. Initial studies UltraVista images combined with images from other telescopes, have revealed the presence of numerous galaxies that can be seen when the universe was less than a billion years (some even earlier times). 

Although this image is UltraVista deepest infrared image size exists, the comments continue. The end result, coming in a few years, will be significantly deeper. 

The surveys are indispensable sources for astronomers and ESO has launched a program for the rich heritage of VISTA and his partner in the visible range, the survey telescope VST (VLT Survey Telescope), accessible to astronomers in the decades future.