Subaru
is committed to being an open use telescope. This means that
astronomers from any country can compete for time to observe
with the telescope. This also means that all data from the telescope
is made open to astronomers after a proprietary period of 18
months. SMOKA
(Subaru-Mitaka Okayama-Kiso Archive System) is the name of this
data archive.
Scientists have already been mining the data in SMOKA to do
original research, such as studying distant galaxies and X-ray
sources. Recently in the news was a report that astronomers
may have obtained an image of the star GQ Lupi and its companion,
possibly one of the first planets outside our solar system.
In this case, Subaru's archive data contributed an image of
the potential planet which helped confirm that the object was
indeed in orbit around a star.
This image of the star GQ Lupi and its companion was created
by Ralph Neuhäuser, Gunther Wüchterl, Markus Mugrauer,
and Ana Bedalov (University of Jena, Germany), Eike Guenther
(Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg, Germany), and Peter
Hauschildt (Hamburger Sternwarte, Germany) based on data from
the Coronagraphic
Imager with Adaptive Optics (CIAO) on the Subaru telescope
that was available from SMOKA.
ESO (European Southern Observatory) press release
http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2005/pr-09-05.html
