Press Release

Images from the ground are affected by atmospheric turbulence which causes the light to be smeared out, even at an excellent site such as the summit of Mauna Kea. The AO system has a curvature sensor to monitor the atmospheric turbulence and a bimorph deformable mirror to compensate for this turbulence, resulting in much sharper images.

Suprime-Cam (Subaru Prime Focus Camera) is a wide field camera for visible light, installed at the prime focus of Subaru Telescope. It can currently produce a 24 x 24 arcminute square image with each exposure, an area almost equal to the size of the full moon (about 31 arcminutes in diameter, see supplement). At present, Subaru is the only large telescope in the world (primary mirror larger than 4 meters in diameter) that can take such a large-scale image.

The Subaru Telescope with IRCS attached to the Cassegrain focus made observations of the optical transient (OT) of Gamma-Ray Burst GRB000926. This is the second time Subaru has been used to observe a GRB OT.

In general, objects like stars and galaxies are so far away from us that we can't detect a shift in their positions due to their motion through space: they appear stationary with respect to the other stars and galaxies. This is why the patterns of stars ("constellations") described by our ancestors hundreds or even thousands of years ago are recognizable to us today.

On May 24th and 25th of this year, OHS (CISCO) at the Nasmyth focus of Subaru Telescope observed the distant radio galaxy 4C+40.36 located about 10 billion light years from Earth. 4C+40.36 is a strong emitter of radio waves. It also produces strong emission due to hydrogen, helium, oxygen and neon gases. This galaxy is known to be very distant because the wavelengths of its gaseous emission lines are greatly shifted towards longer wavelengths.

On June 3rd, 2000, Suprime-Cam obtained its best image to date, with stars appearing a remarkable 0.3 arcsec in diameter (1/6000 the diameter of the full Moon) all across the half-degree field-of-view. This is close to the theoretical maximum sharpness that can be delivered by the camera (now mounted at Subaru Telescope's prime focus) and indicates that the repairs done a month ago to the detached fixed point were done properly.

The Subaru Telescope with IRCS attached to the Cassegrain focus made observations of the optical transient (OT) of Gamma-Ray Burst GRB000301C. Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs for short) are a phenomenon in which a huge amount of energy is released as gamma ray (wavelength < 0.1 nanometer) in a matter of seconds. GRBs were first discovered about 30 years ago but their physical nature has not yet been determined.

M82 is the 82nd object in Charles Messier's 1784 catalogue of faint nebulae. It is located approximately 12 million light-years from the Earth and is classified as an irregular galaxy because of its disordered shape. The bluish band seen running from the upper-left to the lower-right of the image is due to light from stars in the M82 galaxy.