‘Made in India’ spectrograph commissioned on Devasthal Optical Telescope can locate faint light from distant celestial objects

0
831
Indigenously designed and developed ‘Made in India’ spectrograph, commissioned on Devasthal Optical Telescope, can locate faint light from distant celestial objects
Indigenously designed and developed ‘Made in India’ spectrograph, commissioned on Devasthal Optical Telescope, can locate faint light from distant celestial objects
0 0
Azadi Ka Amrit Mahoutsav

InterServer Web Hosting and VPS
Read Time:3 Minute, 15 Second

Indigenously designed and developed ‘Made in India’ spectrograph, commissioned on Devasthal Optical Telescope, can locate faint light from distant celestial objects

By PIB Delhi

Indian Scientists have indigenously designed and developed a low-cost optical spectrograph that can locate sources of faint light from distant quasars and galaxies in a very young universe, regions around supermassive black-holes around the galaxies, and cosmic explosions.

Such spectroscopes were so far imported from abroad involved high costs. The ‘Made in India’ optical spectrograph named as Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC), indigenously designed and developed by Aryabhatta Research Institute of observational sciences (ARIES), Nainital, an autonomous institute of Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India, is about 2.5 times less costly compared to the imported ones and can locate sources of light with a photon-rate as low as about 1 photon per second.

The spectroscope, the largest of its kind among the existing astronomical spectrographs in the country, has been successfully commissioned on the 3.6-m Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT), the largest in the country and in Asia, near Nainital Uttarakhand.

This instrument, a backbone of the 3.6-m DOT for observations of extremely faint celestial sources, uses a complex arrangement of several lenses made of special glasses, polished to better than 5-nanometer smoothness to produce sharp images of the celestial sky. Photons coming from distant celestial sources, collected by the telescope, are sorted into different colors by the spectrograph and are finally converted into electronic recordable signals using an in-house developed Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) camera cooled to an extremely low temperature of -120 0C. The total cost of this instrument is nearly Rs. 4 Crore.

Dr. Amitesh Omar, scientist at ARIES, led this project with a technical and scientific team, which together researched and developed various optical, mechanical, and electronics subsystems of the spectrograph and camera. The spectrograph is presently being used by astronomers from India and abroad to study distant quasars and galaxies in a very young universe, regions around supermassive black-holes around the galaxies, cosmic explosions like supernovae and highly energetic Gamma-ray bursts, young and massive stars, and faint dwarf galaxies.

“The indigenous efforts to build complex instruments like ADFOSC in India is an important step to become ‘Aatmanirbhar’ in the field of astronomy & astrophysics,” said Prof. Dipankar Banerjee, Director, ARIES.

Expertise from various national institutes, organizations, including the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and some micro-small-medium-enterprises, were involved to review and build parts of the instrument serving as an example of effective collaboration. With this expertise, ARIES now plans to commission more complex instruments such as spectro-polarimeter and high spectral resolution spectrograph on the 3.6-m Devasthal telescope in the near future.

https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/userfiles/image/image0010DGO.png

This collage shows pictures of the 3.6-m Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT), the ‘Made-in-India’ ARIES-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC), and an image of celestial source obtained from the telescope. The image of the Crab Nebulae shows the aftermath of a star explosion, which happened in the Milky-way galaxy in the year 1054. The color-coded optical spectrum obtained from ADFOSC shown here is of a recently dead massive star with spectral signatures of various elements such as Hydrogen, Iron, Sodium, Calcium, etc., once synthesized in its core and now being expelled out. This material becomes raw material to form new stars and planets in the future, thereby establishing the continuous cycle of birth and death of heavenly bodies.

[More details on the 3.6-m DOT and ADFOSC can be obtained from the URL:

https://www.aries.res.in/facilities/astronomical-telescopes/36m-telescope

https://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/116/09/1472.pdf

For further details, Dr. Amitesh Omar, Scientist-F (email: aomar[at]aries[dot]res[dot]in,9012570011) can be contacted.]

About Post Author

Editor Desk

Antara Tripathy M.Sc., B.Ed. by qualification and bring 15 years of media reporting experience.. Coverred many illustarted events like, G20, ICC,MCCI,British High Commission, Bangladesh etc. She took over from the founder Editor of IBG NEWS Suman Munshi (15/Mar/2012- 09/Aug/2018 and October 2020 to 13 June 2023).
Happy
Happy
0 %
Sad
Sad
0 %
Excited
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
Angry
0 %
Surprise
Surprise
0 %
Advertisements

USD