NAOJ / Subaru Telescope Scientist Masato Onodera talks about Recent Science Highlights and Future Prospects at Subaru

1. Subaru Telescope
Recent science highlights
and future prospects
Masato Onodera
Subaru Telescope ( )
National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
@SubaruTel_Eng
Credit: Hideaki Fujiwara

2. Subaru Telescope
Named after the Pleiades in Japanese
Optical and infrared telescope
27 ft. diameter and 7.9 inches thick single
dish primary mirror
Construction : 1991 — 1999
Science operation : 2000 — present
Credit: Hana Hou! (August/September 2018)

3. What we are good at
👍 Wide
Cover a large patch of the sky at once; chances of
serendipity
👍 Sharp
Extrasolar planets, structures within distant galaxies,
dark matter distributions
👍 Large
Faint astronomical objects
Credit:
ESO & Andy Strappazzon
Hiromitsu Kosaka, HSC project, & NAOJ

4. HSC : wide field imager
Hyper Suprime-Cam mounted on the prime focus
870-megapixel camera (cf. 12-megapixel in
iPhone Xs) for optical wavelength
1.5 degree diameter FoV (3x Moon diameter)
Good image quality
Credit: HSC-SSP & NAOJ

5. New extremely distant dwarf planet, orbiting
the edge of the solar system
Implication on even further, unknown dwarf
planet, so-called "Planet X"
Discovery of "The Goblin"
Sheppard et al. (2018)

6. Follow-up campaign of the binary
neutron star merger event GW170817
August 18-19, 2017 August 24-25, 2017
Days after the GW event
Brightness(magnitude)
Optical light
Near-IR light
1. Search : wide-field capability
2. Measure : large light collecting area
3. Physics : comparison with theory
Good model! (kilonova)
Bad model
Tominaga et al. (2017); Utsumi et al. (2017); Tanaka et al. (2017)

7. Widest 3D dark matter maps
Ongoing large survey using HSC for 300 nights in 5 years
Wide field : large patches of the sky, more galaxies
Good image quality : distortion of galaxy shapes due to gravity
from dark matter
Large aperture : faint galaxies at more distant universe
All data is public! You can freely download everything from the
survey and dig them by yourself. Visit https://hsc.mtk.nao.ac.jp/
ssp/
Credit: HSC-SSP & NAOJ

8. 1.3 billion
years ago
7.8 billion
years ago
You
are
here
Less structure
in the pastMore structure
now
Oguri et al. (2018); Miyazaki et al. (2018)
Structure growth over cosmic time
🌕x6

9. Exoplanet studies with
ultrasharp imaging
Atlas of protoplanetary disks taken
with HiCIAO instrument with adaptive
optics (Credit: SEEDS project)

10. CHARIS : imager and spectrograph
for extrasolar planet hunting
Optimized to obtain image and spectra simultaneously for
extrasolar planets with ultrasharp image quality
First scientific results are just arriving
Currie et al. (2018)
κ And b

11. Future prospects

12. IRD : another extrasolar
planet hunting machine
Science operation started in 2018
Extremely precise velocity measurement in near-IR
wavelength
Detect 4.5 mph movement of stars due to planets
around them
Goal is to find earth-like planets around low-mass stars
Credit: Astrobiology Center

13. Enhancing the wide field capability
PFS (under construction; 2021–)
Measure precise distance by taking optical to near-IR
spectra of 2000+ galaxies at once to study dark energy
ULTIMATE-Subaru (concept design; 2026–)
Panoramic view and sharp image quality in the infrared
wavelength to study galaxies from the birth to the death
PFS ULTIMATE-Subaru