Press Release

Using the Subaru Telescope, a team of astronomers led has discovered the most distant protocluster of galaxies ever found—one that existed less than one billion years after the Big Bang. This discovery of a protocluster in the early Universe advances our understanding of how large-scale structures form and how galaxies evolve.

A team of astronomers has explored the synergies between the Subaru Telescope and the United Kingdom Infra-Red Telescope (UKIRT) to locate numerous distant galaxies in the ancient universe and investigate their star formation activity. By combining narrow-band filter observations from both the Subaru Telescope and the UKIRT, the team has been able to obtain clean panoramic maps of parts of the distant universe about 9 billion years ago. This dual mode of surveying faint galaxies provides a powerful technique for selecting and studying star-forming galaxies during their formation and evolution.

An international team of astronomers has discovered a rare, rectangular-shaped galaxy that has a striking resemblance to an emerald-cut diamond. While using the Subaru Prime Focus Camera to look for globular clusters of stars swarming around NGC 1407, a bright, giant galaxy in the Constellation Eridanus, the researchers discovered an unusually shaped dwarf galaxy toward the edge of their image. The lead author of the paper describing the research, Professor Alister Graham, said, "It's one of those things that just makes you smile because it shouldn't exist, or rather, you don't expect it to exist." Its discovery allows astronomers to obtain useful information for modeling other galaxies.

Research by an international team of scientists has revealed a "stealth merger" of dwarf galaxies, where an in-falling satellite galaxy is nearly undetectable by conventional means yet has a substantial influence on its host galaxy. The Subaru Telescope captured high-resolution images of individual stars in a dense stream of stars in the outer regions of a nearby dwarf galaxy (NGC 4449); these outlying stars are the remains of an even smaller companion galaxy in the process of merging with its host.

An international research group led by Masamune Oguri, an assistant professor at IPMU, has made a precise measurement of dark matter distribution in galaxy clusters by analyzing both 'strong' and 'weak' gravitational lensing phenomena observed in images of 28 galaxy clusters taken at the Subaru 8.2-meter telescope. The result settles a long-standing controversy about the central concentration of dark matter distribution.