Press Release

Using Subaru Telescope's Infrared Camera and Spectrograph (IRCS), astronomer Toshiya Ueta and his colleagues from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have detected structures resembling "bullets" and "horns" in the gas and dust surrounding an aging star called AFGL 618. This is the first detection of these structures in the near-infrared (the wavelength region beyond the reddest light humans can see).

A collaboration led by astronomers from Tohoku University in Japan has used Subaru Telescope to discover a galaxy rapidly forming stars when the Universe was less than a billion years old. Images and spectra from the Subaru and Keck telescopes reveal that the galaxy has a high-speed outflow of hydrogen gas believed to be caused by a massive burst of star formation.

The Adaptive Optics (AO) system, installed at the Cassegrain focus of Subaru Telescope, corrects star light affected by atmospheric turbulence and delivers a high quality image close to the theoretical limits of the telescope. Since its first light in December 2000, we have adjusted the AO system with test observations and the spectroscopic observations with AO and Infrared Camera and Spectrograph (IRCS) were recently successful. These results make the most of Subaru's capabilities.

Observations with Suprime-Cam on Subaru Telescope have detected for the first time long filaments of ionized hydrogen gas extending 110,000 light years above the disk of a galaxy. In the new image, the gas shows up in red and purple and appears to burst out of the center of the galaxy, reaching as far as the upper-left corner of the image.

This image of Uranus, its ring system, and two of its satellites Miranda (top-center) and Ariel (bottom-left) is from Subaru Telescope's Coronagraphic Imager with Adaptive Optics (CIAO) combined with Subaru Telescope's adaptive optics system (AO).

Dr. Masahide Takada-Hidai, a Subaru Open Use observer from Tokai University, and his observation team made spectroscopic observations of the supernova SN 2002ap with the High Dispersion Spectrograpgh (HDS) on February 2nd (HST). This supernova was discovered by a Japanese amateur astronomer Mr. Youji Hirose on January 29th, 2002 (JST).

The Adaptive Optics (AO) system, installed at the Cassegrain focus of Subaru Telescope, corrects star light affected by atmospheric turbulence and delivers a high quality image close to the theoretical limits of the telescope. Since its first light in December 2000, we have adjusted the AO system with test observations and the spectroscopic observations with AO and Infrared Camera and Spectrograph (IRCS) were recently successful. These results make the most of Subaru's capabilities.