Subaru

We are talking about the most powerful, specialized and sensitive observatories on Earth.

Central to this systematic effort is the 8.2 meter Subaru telescope.

I've seen pictures of the Subaru telescope.

It's operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, right near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

But what makes this specific telescope the weapon of choice for this hunt?

It covers a massive 1.5-degree field of view with an incredibly fine pixel scale.

Why does the field of view matter so much?

This makes Subaru uniquely suited to conduct deep, wide-field optical surveys.

It was.

They took incredibly sensitive optical images from the Subaru telescope in Hawaii and layered them over massive sky maps made by global radio telescopes.

Yeah, and they were searching a very specific slice of time, the era when the universe was just one point one to one point three billion years old.

Here's where it gets really interesting, though, because to find a galaxy heavily cloaked in dust within that specific window of time, you have to use a mechanism called the Lyman-break technique.

Yeah.

This is us together going, okay, maybe I didn't know about it before, but now I have an opportunity to engage in something that is uniquely from here, even though Matariki is also known as Subaru and other parts of the world as Matali'i.

So if we're all gathered under the same skies, I think that's a really good unifying opportunity.

And...