The European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) new Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument is a bit of a time machine. It is designed to take highly detailed photographs of objects that are very far away in space, which in astronomy means objects from a very long time ago.

The MUSE was officially activated just over a year ago and was the second of the next generation instrument installed on the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile.

MUSE is used to take long exposure images of very small areas of deep space. This long exposure time allows the light from faint objects enough time to make an impression. MUSE then splits each field of view into 24 image segments which are then split into 48 slices or “mini slits”, for a grand total of 1152 mini slits.

Next each of the 48 mini slits is put into a spectrograph which divides the light into 4000 constituent colors. From this MUSE generates a 3D image and reveals the composition, distance and internal motion of very distant galaxies and stars.

After spending 27 hours photographing the Hubble Deep Field South region, the MUSE was able to not only provide more detail than Hubble, but revealed more than 20 objects that were missed by previous surveys.

Prior to MUSE, astronomers had to carefully examine each object with a variety of other instruments. The new instrument can do a more complete job, far more quickly.

“After just a few hours of observations at the telescope, we had a quick look at the data and found many galaxies — it was very encouraging. And when we got back to Europe we started exploring the data in more detail. It was like fishing in deep water and each new catch generated a lot of excitement and discussion of the species we were finding,”  explained Roland Bacon principal investigator of the MUSE instrument and leader of the commissioning team, in a statement.

In total, the MUSE team was able to measure the distance to 189 galaxies. These ranged from fairly close galaxies to some that were there when the Universe was less than one billion years old, galaxies that may well no longer exist.

“The greatest excitement came when we found very distant galaxies that were not even visible in the deepest Hubble image. After so many years of hard work on the instrument, it was a powerful experience for me to see our dreams becoming reality,” said Roland Bacon.

For the closer galaxies, MUSE is able to look at different parts of the galaxy and reveal movement as well as how different properties of the galaxy vary from one area to the next.

“Now that we have demonstrated MUSE’s unique capabilities for exploring the deep Universe, we are going to look at other deep fields, such as the Hubble Ultra Deep field. We will be able to study thousands of galaxies and to discover new extremely faint and distant galaxies. These small infant galaxies, seen as they were more than 10 billion years in the past, gradually grew up to become galaxies like the Milky Way that we see today,” adds Bacon.

In addition to distant, deep space objects, MUSE will also allow for incredibly detailed imagery of objects close to home including planets and moons.