October welcomed a major milestone in a global telescope collaboration involving astronomers from our Department of Physics.
The 4MOST telescope – which stands for 4-meter Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope – captured its first light, marking the beginning its scientific journey.
4MOST is the largest multi-object spectroscopic survey facility in the southern hemisphere.
Development on 4MOST started in 2010 and has involved over 700 scientists from across the world. Professor Peder Norberg, from our Centre of Extragalactic Astronomy and Institute for Computational Cosmology, has led Durham’s involvement in the project.
Peder has overseen two key parts of the 4MOST operations. The first has been coordinating the software development that will enable the sophisticated running of science operations with 4MOST in the coming years. The second has been organising the survey plan that will be used by 4MOST to undertake galactic and extragalactic observations.
Installed on the UK-built VISTA telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s site in Chile, 4MOST is an exciting new instrument for astronomers.
It does not just take pictures of the sky; it records spectra – capturing the light of each object in every individual colour.
It can unravel the light of 2,400 celestial objects simultaneously, allowing astronomers to study the chemical make-up of stars and galaxies, to understand how they form and evolve.
4MOST uses over 2,400 optical fibres, each the size of a human hair. They catch the light of celestial objects and transport it to spectrographs which break the light up into its different colours.
Taking measurements every 10-20 minutes, 4MOST will collect data such as temperatures, chemical compositions and movement of stars and distances to galaxies. Over time, 4MOST will build a catalogue of tens of millions of objects spread across the southern sky.
The 4MOST project has been led by the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) in Germany with significant involvement from numerous universities globally. Durham is an institutional member of 4MOST giving our physicists significant access to the data it gathers. This data will become a major source of science exploration for our world-leading astronomers.
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