24-armed Giant to Probe Early Lives of Galaxies

[Craig]

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1251/

 

A powerful new instrument called KMOS has just been successfully tested on ESO’s Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. KMOS is unique as it will be able to observe not just one, but 24 objects at the same time in infrared light and study the structure simultaneously within each one. It will provide crucial data to help understand how galaxies grew and evolved in the early Universe — and provide it much faster than has been possible up to now. KMOS was built by a consortium of universities and institutes in the United Kingdom and Germany in collaboration with ESO.

 

The K-band Multi-Object Spectrograph (KMOS), attached to the Very Large Telescope (VLT) Unit Telescope 1 at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile, has successfully achieved first light. During the four-month period from August this 2.5-tonne instrument had been shipped from Europe, reassembled, tested and installed following months of careful planning. This was the culmination of many years of design and construction by teams in the UK and Germany, and at ESO. KMOS is the second of the second generation of instruments to be installed on ESO’s VLT (the first was X-shooter: see eso0920).

 

"KMOS will bring an exciting new capability to the suite of instrumentation at the ESO VLT. Its initial success is a tribute to the dedication of a large team of engineers and scientists. The team looks forward to many future scientific discoveries with KMOS once the instrument commissioning is fully complete," says Ray Sharples (University of Durham, UK), co-principal investigator of KMOS.