Category Archives: Science

First observation of SSP

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Dr. Khee-Gan Lee (Associate Professor, Kavi IPMU) It was a moment of anticipation and nervous energy, pent up from 16 years of discussions, preparations, planning, and hard work from all involved. But soon after midnight on March 27th, the Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) — the most complex instrument ever built for the Subaru Telescope — was pointed at an unremarkable… Read more »

First Light!

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We are excited to report that we had the first light on 22 March 2025! PFS is the project proceeded under the international collaboration since the kick-off meeting in 2010. A part of our activities have been reported here on the blog. Thanks to great efforts on the collaborating institutes and the partners and the vendors, all the instrument were… Read more »

What PFS is doing recently?

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It’s been a while since the last article, so we are going to report our activities last month. We all, both scientists and developers, were pretty busy last month. Firstly, we had two engineering observations in May 2024.The PFS project is in the final phase of development, aiming to start the scientific operation in the 2025A semester (i.e., February 2025),… Read more »

PFS science working group co-chair meeting at Tufts University

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The PFS project is in its final stage of hardware delivery and approaching such a critical phase as the start of scientific operation. Under this circumstance, a meeting of the science working groups took place at Tufts University near Boston, USA from August 30 to September 1, 2023. In this meeting, the representatives (co-chairs) from each working group shared the… Read more »

PFS Science meeting was held.

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In parallel to the instrument development, the PFS project has been developing hard the science using it. We had the PFS science meeting in early March 2023 at Kavli IPMU (Japan), in the hybrid format with zoom. The PFS science team has been developing a huge survey plan to observe enormous numbers of galaxies and stars in order to study… Read more »

PFS Science Meeting at Columbia University

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PFS Science Meeting was held at Columbia University in New York, USA from October 4 to 7, 2019. PFS Science Team conducts a meeting in which we intensively discuss what kind of observations should be made in the large survey observation using PFS about once a year (see our post for the last year’s meeting). In this meeting, technical topics… Read more »

PFS Science Working Group Meeting at Princeton University

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The PFS Science Team has established a working group for each scientific objective and has vigorously discussed what interesting science cases are to exploit the strengths of PFS and how we optimize the survey observation accordingly (visit our past post and our official web site for more details about science objectives of the project). Based on these discussions we have developed an… Read more »

PFS science working group meeting at MPA

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The PFS Science Team is now planning a large survey observation of the Universe using PFS. Three working groups have been discussing the plans to achieve their major scientific objectives: “Cosmology” research group to reveal the nature of dark matter, dark energy and neutrinos, “Galactic archeology” research group to reconstruct the history of the Milky Way Galaxy where we exist,… Read more »

What will be revealed with PFS?

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— From Masahiro Takada (IPMU) Today we would like to introduce what we can study with PFS! The PFS project aims at three major scientific objectives. One of them is cosmology, in particular the nature of the so-called dark energy that is causing an accelerating expansion of the Universe. Its discovery earned 2011 Novel Prize in Physics. However, the discovery… Read more »