OREANDA-NEWS The Hubble Space Telescope captured the earliest and most distant galaxies during a near-infrared 3D-DASH survey. This allowed astronomers to map the oldest star-forming regions in the Universe and learn how the very first galaxies arose.

The high-resolution survey, dubbed 3D-DASH (The 3D-Drift And SHift), will allow researchers to find the rarest objects and targets for follow-up observations with the help of the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope.

A representative from the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics of Toronto says that since its launch over 30 years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope has been at the forefront of studying early galaxies and how they were changing over the next 10 billion years. 3D-DASH extends Hubble's legacy of wide-sky imaging and unravels the mysteries of galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

Until now, surveys of such vast areas were available only to ground-based telescopes and had a low resolution, which limited the possibilities of observing and studying them. 3D-DASH makes it possible to identify many unique phenomena, such as the most massive galaxies in the Universe, highly active black holes, and galaxies that are on the verge of colliding and merging into a common one. To capture such vast areas of the sky, the researchers used a new technique that enlarges Hubble's field of view by eight times by combining a mosaic of multiple images into a single image.