Join ʻImiloa and planetarium guest speaker Hitoshi Murayama for “Subaru’s Prime Focus Spectrograph: A New Compound Eye Gazing at the Universe.” Dr. Murayama is a well-known theoretical particle physicist, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, and the founding director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) at the University of Tokyo.

About the Talk:

Where do we come from? Where are we going? These questions are common to the entire humankind, and especially deeply rooted in Polynesian and East Asian cultures. We built a new $100M instrument to study these questions mounted on the Subaru telescope atop Maunakea. It will explore how stars and galaxies are born in the gravitational womb of dark matter. It will study how the universe has been expanding and where it is going, or whether it will end. These grand questions can be studied only thanks to the pristine environment and public support on Hawaiʻi Island. The prime focus spectrograph will have 2400 eyes on the universe to conduct these studies which would have taken 1000 years otherwise.