Story thread · 3 reports / 3 sources

MOONS Spectrograph Achieves First Light: 1,000 Stars in Milky Way's Hidden Core Mapped at Once

techtimes.com · 10dShare

MOONS spectrograph achieved First Light at ESO's Very Large Telescope on September 3, 2026, becoming the first instrument to simultaneously capture near-infrared spectra of 1,000 stars in the Milky Way's dust-obscured Galactic Bulge, a region no ground-based optical spectrograph had ever reached at this scale.

First report: How a new instrument could reveal the secrets of the stars — bbc.co.uk, 11d