Breaking Distant Light

Explanation: In the distant universe, time appears to run slowly. Since time-dilated light appears shifted toward the red end of the spectrum ( redshifted ), astronomers are able to use cosmological time-slowing to help measure vast distances in the universe. Featured , the light from distant galaxies has been broken up into its constituent colors ( spectra ), allowing astronomers to measure the cosmological redshift of known spectral lines . The novelty of the featured image is that the distance to hundreds of galaxies can be measured from a single frame, in this case one taken by the Visible MultiObject Spectrograph (VIMOS) operating at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) array in Chile . Analyzing the space distribution of distant objects will allow insight into when and how stars and galaxies formed, clustered, and evolved in the early universe .