This February, the international Steering Group for Roman-Subaru Synergistic Observations announced that a concept designed by our team was one of three science themes selected for observations with the Subaru telescope in Hawai’i.  The official announcement of the selection, along with general information about the JAXA/ISAS - Roman project, can be found at the following website: https://www.ir.isas.jaxa.jp/Roman/JAXA_Roman.html. The report of the Steering Group can be accessed here.

The PIT's proposed concept, the Subaru PFS-Roman Deep Survey (or SuPR Deep for short) would use 40 nights on the telescope to observe the detailed spectrum of more than 10,000 galaxies in the two Roman High Latitude Wide Area Survey (HLWAS) Deep Drilling Fields, which will be observed intensely by both the Roman Space Telescope and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time. More detail about the SuPR Deep survey can be found in the whitepaper that our team submitted to the Steering Group.

The measurements obtained by SuPR Deep will enable improvements to our methods for determining photometric redshifts — i.e., estimates of the distances to galaxies based only on imaging data — as well as precision calibration of the distance distribution of the objects observed in the Roman HLWAS.  In order to study the nature of dark energy, we must understand these distance distributions with exquisite precision; thanks to the time allocated via the Roman-Subaru Synergistic Observations program, this goal is now within reach.

This achievement is due to the hard work of many PIT members, including Brett Andrews, Chihway Chang, Ami Choi, Olivier Dore, Chris Hirata, Arun Kannawadi, Alex Malz, Daniel C. Masters, Hironao Miyatake, Jeffrey A. Newman, Atsushi Nishizawa, Jennie Paine, Nikolina Sarcevic, Tomomi Sunayama, Chun-Hao To, Michael Troxel, and Boyan Yin. We are grateful to you all for your work, and excited for the science that will come from this opportunity!