I’m searching for galaxies and their central super massive black holes in the early universe using imaging data of the wide-field survey with the Subaru telescope. How super massive black holes formed is one of the biggest problems in the modern Astronomy, and I’m trying to solve this problem by studying celestial objects in the early universe.

I have been developing an astronomical instrument called adaptive optics. I’m planning to bring-in an instrument called laser tomography adaptive optics to the Subaru telescope in order to achieve unprecedentedly high spatial resolution observations. Utilizing the capability, I’m planning to conduct a search for supermassive black holes and a study on the cosmological evolution of the dynamical structure of galaxies.

Adaptive optics will be a fundamental technology for the next generation of very large ground-based telescopes following the Subaru telescope. Although the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope, which is a large telescope project I‘ｍ involved, has not progressed due to difficulties, we will conduct research on adaptive optics with the hope that the telescope will be an eye for humanity to look through the universe.

I was interested in the researches of the universe when I entered the university. At the time of the choice of my research field in the middle of the undergraduate course, I was interested in understanding the origin of the structure of galaxies. But, the first research I was involved in was on the super massive black holes in an active phase, and the topic was somewhat different from researches on galaxies. Fortunately, I was able to conduct my research using the data which are unique in the world at that time, then I was heavily involved in the study of super massive black holes. When I started the research, the researches of super massive black holes and galaxies are recognized as a bit separated topics, but as researches progressed, the research trend changed to the direction that the two topics cannot be divided each other. What written in textbooks can be changed following the progresses of various researches.

Learn many things and make challenges in many fields during your university and graduate school period. In your research, you are encouraged to put your own ideas and do a lot of trial and error. For example, in the field of observational astronomy, many cutting-edge datasets have been made publicly available worldwide under the open-sky policy. Particularly, data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which is expected to revolutionize the observational astronomy, are being released continuously. There can be many analyses with simple ideas that have not been applied worldwide. I believe that great discoveries are made when we enjoy analyzing data with unique ideas.