The Chandra Deep Field South (CDF-S) is an image taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory satellite. The location was chosen because, like the Lockman Hole, it is a relatively clear "window" through the ubiquitous clouds of neutral hydrogen gas in our Milky Way galaxy, which allows us to clearly see the rest of the universe in X-rays.[1] The image is centered on RA 3h 32m 28.0s DEC -27° 48′ 30″ (J2000.0), covering 0.11 square degrees, measuring 16 arcminutes across. This patch of sky lies in the Fornax constellation.[2][3]
The image was created by compositing 11 individual ACIS-I exposures for a cumulative exposure time of over one million seconds, in the period 1999-2000, by a team led by Riccardo Giacconi.[2] This region was selected for observation because it has much less galactic gas and dust to obscure distant sources.[3]
Multispectral observations of the region were carried out in collaboration with the Very Large Telescope and the Paranal Observatory. Through the course of these investigations, the X-ray background was determined to originated from the central supermassive black holes of distant galaxies, and a better characterization of Type-II Quasars was obtained. [Note 1] The CDFS discovered over 300 X-ray sources, many of them from "low luminosity" AGN lying about 9 billion light years away. The study also discovered the then most distant Quasar 2, lying at redshift z=3.7 , some 12 billion light years away.[3]
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