Skip to main content

Subaru Telescope can now Analyze 2,400 Galaxies Simultaneously

First light is an exciting time for astronomers and engineers who help bring new telescopes up to speed. One of the most recent and significant first light milestones recently occurred at the Subaru Telescope in Hawai’i. Though it has been in operation since 2005, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s (NAOJ) main telescope recently received an upgrade that will allow it to simultaneously observe 2400 astronomical objects at once over a patch of sky the size of several moons.

Those 2400 objects will be observed by the Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS), which itself has multiple subcomponents and was developed by around a dozen universities and companies on four continents. Its major components consist of a “Prime Focus Instrument,” which contains 2400 individual fibers and lets it concentrate on various parts of the sky. Data from those fibers is then fed to a Spectrograph System (SpS), which analyzes it to produce the data used in scientific papers.

The SpS consists of four separate spectrographs, covering spectra from the ultraviolet to the near-infrared, much more than a human eye can take in alone. Or, as a press release from NAOJ puts it more poetically, it covers “one and a half rainbows.” 

Presentation on how to use the PFS in cosmology.
Credit – ESO (ASIAA) YouTube Channel / Ryu Makiya

Unfortunately, these sensitive instruments won’t usually be used to capture rainbows, but theoretically, the Wide Field Corrector could. It is a seven-lens optical system developed specifically for this upgrade that allows Subaru’s operators to correct for errors in image collection before they become a problem.

There are also some supporting systems to enable the actual data collection to take place. n addition to the SpS, the PFS utilizes a giant 8960 x 5778 pixel CMOS camera known as the Metrology Camera System to track where precisely the fibers collecting the data are located. If any are out of place, it could throw off the data the system collects. 

All of these upgrades come with high hopes – the goal of the PFS upgrade is literally to understand where the universe came from and where it’s going. It will coordinate with the Hyper Suprime-Cam already installed in an effort to “reveal the nature of dark matter and dark energy, structure formation in the universe, and the physical processes of galaxy formation and evolution.

Take a virtual tour of the Subaru telescope.
Credit – SCExAO YouTube Channel

That’s a lot for one telescope upgrade, but it will surely have lots of data to analyze. Maybe the team could implement an eyepiece to attach to the PFS before it starts collecting data like it did when the telescope was first commissioned back in 2005. Potentially, the team that worked so hard on it could even actually see some rainbows then.

Learn More:
NAOJ – 2400 New Eyes on the Sky to See Cosmic Rainbows
Prime Focus Spectrograph
UT – Astronomers set a new Record and Find the Farthest Galaxy. Its Light Took 13.4 Billion Years to Reach us
UT – Subaru Telescope Sees 1800 Supernovae

Lead Image:
Image of the PFS mounted on the telescope.
Credit – Kavli IPMU

The post Subaru Telescope can now Analyze 2,400 Galaxies Simultaneously appeared first on Universe Today.



from Universe Today https://ift.tt/mD5dpXF
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More Data and Machine Learning has Kicked SETI Into High Gear

For over sixty years, astronomers and astrophysicists have been engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). This consists of listening to other star systems for signs of technological activity (or “technosignatures), such as radio transmissions. This first attempt was in 1960, known as Project Ozma, where famed SETI researcher Dr. Frank Drake (father of the Drake Equation) and his colleagues used the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to conduct a radio survey of Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Since then, the vast majority of SETI surveys have similarly looked for narrowband radio signals since they are very good at propagating through interstellar space. However, the biggest challenge has always been how to filter out radio transmissions on Earth – aka. radio frequency interference (RFI). In a recent study, an international team led by the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (DIAA) applied a new deep-learning algorithm to data collecte...
Post a Comment
Read more

Could We Launch a Mission to Chase Down Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS?

It’s a tantalizing prospect. Since 2017, three interstellar objects have been spotted passing through our solar system: 1I/ʻOumuamua, 2I/Borisov… and just this month, 3I/ATLAS. Discovered on July 1st by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert Survey, 3I/ATLAS is zipping through the inner solar system in the last half of 2025. Certainly, all assets on the ground and in space will be turned towards 3I/ATLAS over the next few frenzied months, to glean what we can… but what would 3I/ATLAS look like up close? Can we even consider chasing down such a speedy visitor? from Universe Today https://ift.tt/HAho7wC via IFTTT
Post a Comment
Read more

SETI Researchers Double-Checked 1 Million Objects for Signs of Alien Signals

We can’t help ourselves but wonder about life elsewhere in the Universe. Any hint of a biosignature or even a faint, technosignature-like event wrests our attention away from our tumultuous daily affairs. In 1984, our wistful quest took concrete form as SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence . Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, SETI has turned up nothing. Recently, scientists used a powerful new data system to re-examine data from one million cosmic objects and still came up empty-handed. Did they learn anything from this attempt? This effort used COSMIC , which stands for  Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster . It’s a signal-processing and algorithm system attached to the Karl G. Jansky  Very Large Array  (VLA) radio astronomy observatory. According to SETI, it’s designed to “search for signals throughout the Galaxy consistent with our understanding of artificial radio emissions. “ Modern astronomy generates vast volumes of data and al...
Post a Comment
Read more