New Japanese Camera Takes Jaw-Dropping Portrait of Andromeda

Japan's Subaru Telescope located at the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea has a new instrument and its debut image, a portrait of the Andromeda galaxy, shows the device is more than capable of carrying out its promised missions of producing a large-scale survey of the universe with intense image quality.

Called the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), those behind the new piece of machinery say it "represents a giant step into a new era of observational astronomy" that may yet unveil new insights into existence of dark energy and matter.

Andromeda, meanwhile, is our own galaxy's largest nearby galactic neighbor at 2.5 million light-years away. It's entire disk spans 260,000 light-years -- more than double that of the Milky Way -- and is visible to the naked eye.

The earliest known observation of it dates as far back as 964 AD when the Persian astronomer al-Sufi wrote about it and is of particular interest to researchers due to its similarities with the Milky Way who hope that in studying one, they will better understand the other.

Through its field of view seven times that of its predecessor, the HSC promises to aid in this search.

First on its to-do list is a cosmic-census, which, according to Masahiro Takada, the chair of the HSC science working group, refers to "a large-scale imaging survey of every galaxy over a wide solid angle in the sky and in sufficient depth to probe the distant universe" and "will include the detailed measurement of hundreds of millions of galaxy shapes and assessment of the effects of gravitational lensing."

Nor does it stop there.

Satoshi Miyazaki, director of the HSC Project, said HSC's ability to capture images as clear as one of Andromeda "augurs the instrument's capabilities for capturing weak lensing, which is central to HSC's scientific goals of surveying the parameters and properties of dark matter and dark energy in the universe as well as exploring the causes of the accelerating expansion of the universe."