COURTESY SUBARU TELESCOPE / 2016
A starry sky shines over the Subaru Telescope.
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The Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea will be able to observe more than 2,000 celestial objects at once with a new instrument that will go online in February.
The observatory announced Wednesday that it will install a new instrument called the Prime Focus Spectrograph, which will take advantage of the telescope’s wide field of view to conduct spectroscopic analyses of multiple objects at once using a structure similar to an insect’s compound eye.
The instrument contains about 2,400 individual prisms, each of which can be used to collect light from a different celestial object simultaneously.
The spectrograph was developed over nearly 15 years by an international collaboration of more than 20 research institutions worldwide, led by the University of Tokyo Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Chiba, Japan.
Using the instrument, scientists plan to carry out a large-sky survey program over the next five years, taking spectroscopic data of millions of distant galaxies and hundreds of thousands of stars in our Milky Way galaxy.
“It is deeply moving to see it come together as a single instrument system,” said Prime Focus Spectrograph Project Manager Naoyuki Tamura in a statement. “The discoveries that will be made with this cutting-edge instrument are something all of the people of Hawaii can be proud of; to be at the center of such a meaningful international collaboration and human endeavor.”
