Vimos is an international telescope project, conceived and led by a consortium of European institutes, that aims to map the large-scale structure of the Universe and to study the evolution of galaxies. The telescope is named after the Spanish word for “view”, which reflects its wide field of view. It is located at Cerro Paranal in Chile, one of the best sites for astronomical observations. Construction started in 1998 and first light was achieved in 2002. The instrument has been operational since then and has proven to be very successful.
The Vimos telescope consists of four identical telescopes, each with a primary mirror 8.2 m in diameter. The mirrors are arranged in a square configuration with a baseline of 100 m. This gives Vimos a very wide field of view (1 degree x 1 degree) which makes it ideal for surveys of large areas of sky. The light from each mirror is collected by an optical fiber and fed into an spectrograph located inside one of the VLT Unit Telescopes (UTs). This allows simultaneous observations with all four telescopes.
The main science goal of Vimos is to study the large-scale structure of the Universe and its evolution over time. To do this we need to map out where galaxies are located and how they are moving around within cosmic structures such as clusters and voids. This information can be used to test theories about how these structures form and evolve. For example, we can use our data to measure how fast galaxies are moving away from us (the so-called Hubble flow) as a function of their distance from us. Comparing this to predictions from different cosmological models helps us understand which model best describes our Universe