A large research project took place

High-tech Medusa

Gordian knot of the 21st century

What you see in the above picture, can be described by the term "Gordian knot of the 21st century", or the term "high-tech Medusa" or both terms at once. However, this picture was taken in the working area of the telescope Very Large Telescope (VLT) located at the European southern Observatory (European Southern Observatory, ESO), located in Cerro-Penarol (Cerro Paranal, Chile. And this picture shows an incredibly complex cooling system is one of the main instruments of the telescope.Web of pipes and hoses is a tool cooling system MUSE, one of the latest additions, recently obtained by the VLT telescope. This instrument consists of 24 independent detectors, each individual needs a continuous flow of coolant.

System MUSE

Yepun telescope

  These innovative cooling systems were originally developed by the specialists of ESO for the needs of the VLT telescope.  And, thanks to a simple licensing policy such systems work in different corners of the globe and not only on astronomical instruments.Tool MUSE is an integral field spectrograph (integral field spectrograph, IFS), the use of which allows to extract the maximum scientific information from the light coming from distant cosmic objects, remote from Earth to millions and billions of light years. Each pixel of the MUSE spectrograph measures the intensity and other parameters of light, calculating a number of functions related to the wavelength of light (color).

The effect of gravitational lenses

Aerial view of the   VLT  observatory

    The resulting data are a set of pseudo-three-dimensional data in which each pixel has a full spectrum of light. Initially, the tool MUSE was created to facilitate and deepen the study of the content and the processes occurring in the Universe in the earliest periods of its existence, during the periods when the active formation of stars and galaxies. But the scope of the instrument MUSE is not limited to the study of the very first (most distant from Earth) space objects at closer distances with spectrograph, scientists make maps of the distribution of dark matter in clusters of galaxies, using the effect of gravitational lenses from the secondary space objects.