Press Release

The Subaru Telescope has plans to observe a one-degree wide field near the North Galactic Pole called the "Subaru Deep Field" to study in great detail the contents of this distant part of our Universe. The image shows the first observations made by Subaru of the "Subaru Deep Field." The image is composed of two infrared images taken with CISCO attached to the Subaru Telescope. We could successfully observe the faintest objects on a large infrared image.

A radio galaxy is a galaxy that emits strong radio waves. These waves are powered by an active galactic nucleus (AGN) at its center, which is generally believed to be a black hole whose mass is more than one million times that of the Sun. The AGN is powered by the gravitational energy released as the surrounding gas falls into the black hole.

The planetary nebula M57 (NGC 6720), or the Ring Nebula as it is most commonly referred to for obvious reasons, lies about 1600 light years away from the Earth. The name "planetary nebula" given to this class of objects is due to the fact that many of them appear disc-like, similar to how the planets in our Solar System appear when viewed through a telescope. In reality, planetary nebulae are stars at the point of death.

L1551-IRS5, which is about 450 light years away from the Earth, is believed to be a binary system consisting of two protostars. (A protostar is a cloud of gas which is collapsing prior to starting nuclear fusion at its core.) This picture shows two parallel jets (green) being emitted from a nebula (white, located slightly left of center), within which the protostars are located. Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope had previously revealed the two jets.

Until only very recently, images taken by ground-based telescopes always showed Pluto and Charon blurred together since their maximum separation is only 0.9 arcsec as seen from the Earth. Thanks to the excellent quality of its 8.3-meter primary mirror and the stability of the atmosphere above Mauna Kea, Subaru Telescope has been able to provide clearly separated images of the two bodies using its Cooled Infrared Spectrograph / Camera (CISCO).

An active galaxy and clusters of other distant galaxies are clearly revealed when an infrared image obtained with the recently completed Subaru Telescope is combined with Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images taken in visible light.

The figure shows a cross-cut profile of the light intensity distribution of a star observed with the infrared camera CISCO mounted on the Subaru Telescope. The light intensity or brightness of the stellar image is plotted along the vertical axis against angle along the horizontal axis. The stellar image is wonderfully sharp, with a full-size at half its maximum intensity (or "FWHM") of only 0.198 arcsec.