An international collaboration of academia and industry has resulted in a new camera specially designed to study dark energy.
Subaru Telescope officials installed the Hyper Suprime-Cam last month, Public Information Officer Suzanne Frayser said. The placement of the camera comes a decade after scientists first began planning to build such a device.
“In the late 1990s, dark energy was discovered,” Frayser said. ‘They (astronomers) knew current technology could not probe into that area. Already in 2002, they were thinking of an instrument to meet those technological challenges.”
Dark energy and dark matter make up 95 percent of the universe, she added.
Groups from Japan, Taiwan, the United States and other countries began working with businesses, including camera manufacturer Canon, to create a camera that could both provide the wide field of view and other technical qualifications to study dark energy and fit within Subaru’s existing telescope mounts, Frayser said.
The instrument weighs three tons, is nine feet high and has 116 highly sensitive light sensors with 870 million pixels, each designed to capture light at the wavelength astronomers determined they most wanted to study, Frayser said.
“It’s a new era in observational astronomy,” she added.
Dr. Satoshi Miyazaki, director of the HSC Project, praised in the new instrument, in a written statement provided by Subaru officials.
Hyper Suprime-Cam “is a dream machine for deciphering the mystery of elusive dark energy,” he said. “Who knows what kind of entirely new phenomena or objects might emerge from this kind of survey?”
Frayser said Miyazaki was also enthusiastic in recounting using the instrument to see its first engineering light, the first use of the instrument as a telescope. Miyazaki chose to look at Vega, a bright star in the summer sky, because it would be easy to find through the thin layer of clouds above the telescope. At first, Frayser said, Miyazaki couldn’t see anything, so he made some adjustments and looked again, this time finding the expected bright spot of the star in the bottom of the image.
“With the support from many organizations and many professionals, the (Hyper Suprime-Cam) Project reached a major milestone,” Miyazaki said. “Now I can start thinking about what object to capture. This is the beginning of many observational runs to come.”
Frayser said she did not yet know when the telescope will see its first “scientific light.”
Scientists need to conduct a “census” of billions of objects to better understand how the universe evolved, said Dr. Hitoshi Murayama, director of the University of Tokyo’s Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe.
“No current telescope other than the Subaru Telescope can satisfy the requirements for such a large-scale survey,” he said. “It is clear that Subaru is now leading the way forward with observational cosmology.”