Hawaii Telescope PS1

A new telescope on Haleakala will study brown dwarfs, distant quasars, black holes, supernovae, and search for asteroids and comets. The cutting edge Pan-STARRS 1 telescope will collect science data from dusk to dawn each night, and in the next three years PS1 is expected to discover about 100,000 asteroids, and catalog five billion stars and 500 million galaxies. PS1 will be able to compile the most comprehensive digital map of the 75 percent of the universe visible from Hawaiʻi.

It boasts one of the largest digital cameras of its type – 1,400 megapixels (1.4 gigapixels) that can photograph an area of the sky as large as 36 full Moons in a single exposure, which is much larger than any similar-sized telescope on Earth or in space. The giant digital camera will take over 500 exposures each night, collecting about four terabytes of data (equivalent to 1,000 full DVDs). Computers will rapidly compare each exposure with ones taken earlier to find objects that have moved or whose brightness has changed.

Designed and built by astronomers and engineers of the Pan-STARRS project at UH Mānoa, it has now become the PS1 Science Consortium – a group of ten institutions from Germany, United Kingdom, Taiwan, and UH Mānoa. PS1 is the experimental prototype for a larger telescope to be built called PS4, which will have four times the power of PS1 and is planned for Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

PS1 researchers will be focusing on:

• Searching for small bodies in the inner solar system
• Studying low-mass stars, brown dwarfs, and young stellar objects to learn how our solar system formed
• Discovering hundreds of supernovae that can be used as “standard candles” for measuring distances in our galaxy
• Finding the most distant quasars – black holes fueled in the earliest stages of galaxy formation
• Learning about the characteristics of dark matter