The Telescope | Subaru Telescope, NAOJ

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Because the air on Mauna Kea is thin and dry, Subaru is able to detect mid-infrared light from astronomical objects. At most places on Earth, mid-infrared light is almost completely absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere before it can reach sea level. COMICS is a camera and spectrograph for taking advantage of this rare observing window on Mauna Kea It can be used to study the formation of individual stars in our own Galaxy and large-scale star formation in other galaxies. It can also be used to study the formation of interstellar dust, the raw material for planets.

The Galactic Center

The center of our Galaxy is populated not only by stars but by a large amount of gas and dust. Although the Galactic center is invisible in the optical because of the dust obscuration of stellar light, COMICS clearly reveals the complex dust structures in the mid-infrared. Some bright spots are emission from dust heated by embedded stars. The very center of the Galaxy is the dark part slightly to the right of the center of this image, where astronomers believe a super-massive black hole 2-3 million times more massive than the Sun is present.
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Debris disk around a young star

Stars are born from condensed dust and molecular gas. During their birth, an accretion disk forms first, and then a central protostar grows by swallowing material from the disk. This object, HR 4796A, has almost finished taking material form the disk. This mid-infrared image taken by COMICS has succeeded in detecting the left over debris disk, from which planets are thought to form.
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Ejected gas from an evolved star

Once the hydrogen in its core is fused into helium, a star begins to repeatedly expand and collapse.
These observations by COMICS in three wavelengths show that the mass loss that accompanies these oscillations is not symmetric.

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Interview:

COMICS explores the Universe at room temperature. Between the extreme of cold and hot in the Universe, there are places with dust grains like sand of the beach that have temperature just like sand on the beach This is what COMICS sees.

What is most exciting about COMICS is that pretty much every thing we observe with COMICS will be a new discovery. Mid-infrared observational astronomy is a very new field. The technology to take images in the mid-infrared didn’t come into existence until the 1990’s. COMICS is the first of the second gee ration mid-infrared instruments equipped with large-format mid-infrared detectors to go into operation in the whole world.

Because of the large aperture of Subaru telescope, we will be able to take images with a very fine spatial resolution. One of the reasons why mid-infrared astronomy was slow to develop is that you need an observational site at high altitude like Mauna Kea to detect mid-infrared radiation. The combination of Subaru, Mauna Kea, and COMICS is ideal.

Most researchers use COMICS to study either newly born stars of dying stars within our Galaxy. On the one hand, dust gathers together to form new stars. On the other hand, stars end their lives by ejecting dust. The ejected dust will gather together to form new stars again. I hope to see many exciting results in the field of not only our Galaxy but also external galaxies.

(From an January 2003 interview with COMICS support astronomer Takuya Fujiyoshi and research intern Shigeyuki Sako.)

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