The Subaru telescope will be improving its eyesight by a factor of ten with the completion of a new adaptive optics and laser guide star system. For the past five years, Subaru’s adaptive optics development team had been working on developing an advanced adaptive optics system to better remove the twinkle from starlight passing through Earth’s atmosphere. At the same time, the team was developing a laser guide star system that can create an artificial star anywhere in the sky, opening up a larger portion of the sky to observations with adaptive optics. In October 2006, the team succeeded in testing both new systems on the telescope.

Zooming in on a nearby young star called HD 141569A, astronomers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy used the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawai'i, to discover a hole in a disk of gas and dust encircling the star. The existence of this large gap, which is about the size of the orbit of Saturn, supports the theory that this young star ended its infancy abruptly, by ionizing and pushing away the gas in the disk from which it was born.

Astronomers using the Subaru telescope in Hawai'i have looked 60 million years further back in time than any other astronomers, to find the most distant known galaxy in the universe. In doing so, they are upholding Subaru's record for finding the most distant and earliest galaxies known. Their most recent discovery is of a galaxy called I0K-1 that lies so far away that astronomers are seeing it as it appeared 12.88 billion years ago.

Astronomer Tomotsugu Goto from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency(JAXA) has used the Subaru telescope to identify a distant quasar powered by a massive black hole. The quasar is almost 12.7 billion light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Cancer the Crab. It is the most distant one ever found by a Japanese researcher and the eleventh most distant quasar currently known.

A team of astronomers using the Subaru and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea has discovered giant, three-dimensional filaments of galaxies extending across 200 million light-years of space. These filaments, which formed a mere 2 billion years after the birth of the universe, are the largest-known structures ever discovered. They are studded with more than 30 large concentrations of gas, each up to ten times as massive as our own galaxy. These giant gas clouds are probably the progenitors of the most massive galaxies that exist in the universe today.

David Jewitt from the University of Hawaii and his colleagues discovered 9 new satellites of Saturn using the Subaru telescope. This achievement follows their earlier success in discovering 12 satellites of Saturn using Subaru, Keck and the Gemini North telescopes in May of 2005. This news was reported in the International Astronomy Union Circulars (IAUC) No. 8727.

A close look at the protoplanetary disk around a young star by two teams of astronomers using the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea has led to the unexpected discovery of two banana-shaped arcs facing each other. The disk, which surrounds the star HD142527, also shows a gap that could be the tumultuous birthplace of a planet, and an extended arc that could have formed during a recent encounter with a stellar neighbor. This discovery adds yet more variety to the bewildering diversity of protoplanetary disk shapes-ranging from donuts to spirals-that astronomers are finding as they study the birthing grounds of planets around other stars.

The Subaru Makali‘i School event, held in August of 2005, was a particularly special program among the many astronomy education promotional events held at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Subaru Telescope on the Big Island of Hawaii. The Subaru Makali‘i School is a program that provides high school and college students the opportunity to use the Subaru telescope to make observations relevant to a research theme they have designed themselves?not an easy task, even for professional astronomers. Makali‘i is the Hawaiian name for the Pleiades constellation (known in Japanese as Subaru.)

Subaru observations of the most distant known gamma-ray burst show that most hydrogen between the galaxies had become ionized 900 million years after the Big Bang. This study by researchers from Kyoto University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and NAOJ dates the formation of the first generations of stars and galaxies to an ever precise time than previous studies, and demonstrates the power of gamma-ray bursts to illuminate the early universe.

The Subaru telescope recently focused its attention on Comet Schwassman-Wachmann 3 and its crumbling nucleus. Using Suprime-Cam, astronomers studied a chunk called Fragment B when the comet was only 16.5 million kilometers from Earth. The resulting detailed image shows that as many as thirteen mini-comets have recently broken off from the fragment

A combination of observing strategy and advanced technology has produced the most detailed picture yet of a dust disk surrounding a nearby star. Observations of the disk surrounding the star Beta Pictoris by a team of researchers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Nagoya University and Hokkaido University suggest that asteroid and comet-like objects are colliding to produce fluffy icy dust-balls the size of bacteria.

Ultra-high resolution super computer simulations have succeeded in revealing the future of the earliest and most distant galaxies known. The Subaru telescope and other recent advances in technology have led to the discovery of a large number of galaxies that existed when the universe was less than a quarter of its current age. Dr. Masao Mori (University of California, Los Angeles and Senshu University) and Dr. Masayuki Umemura (University of Tsukuba) calculated in detail how the life-cycle of stars and mergers of these early galaxies lead to the formation of the galaxies in the universe today. This research was published in the March 30, 2006, edition of Nature.

(Japanese Only)

New observations with the Subaru telescope show that dusty cocoons in galaxies exceptionally bright in infrared light hide supermassive black holes actively ingesting matter. Large amounts of material spiraling into a supermassive black hole more massive than a million suns produces strong radiation. However, if the black hole is buried in dust from all directions, this radiation may not easily be detectable. Although theories suggest that actively radiating supermassive black holes deeply buried in dust outnumber those surrounded by a doughnut-shaped region of dust, so far most black holes detected have been the kind surrounded by a doughnut of dust. A research group led by an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan used the Subaru telescope to perform infrared spectroscopy on galaxies exceptionally bright in the infrared, and found evidence for actively mass accreting super-massive black holes completely surrounded by dust.