Cosmic Web Imager (CWI) is an astronomical instrument that allow us to image the three-dimensional distribution of galaxies in the Universe. It was designed and built by a team of international scientists, led by Dr. Christopher M. Hirata of Caltech, and it is currently installed at the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
The Cosmic Web Imager makes use of a novel technique called “stacking” to produce some of the deepest images ever taken of the sky. In this technique, the CWI takes multiple exposures of different patches of sky and then combines them together into a single “stacked” image. This stacked image is much deeper than any one exposure could be, and it reveals faint galaxies that would otherwise be invisible.
The Cosmic Web Imager has been used to study a wide range of astrophysical topics, including:
– The large-scale structure of the Universe (the “cosmic web”)
– The most distant galaxies in the Universe
– Star formation in low-mass galaxies
– The nature of dark matter halos around galaxies