Tuesday, August 25, 2020

ASTROSAT detected UV light from a galaxy, 9.3 billion light-years away


Pune based Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics confirmed that the AstroSat satellite has detected an extreme ultraviolet (UV) ray from a galaxy that is 9.3 billion light-years away from Earth.

What is ASTROSAT?

  • Astrosat is the first multi-wavelength space telescope launched by ISRO from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in 2015. 
  • It has a set of five unique X-ray and ultraviolet telescopes. The mission duration was planned for 5 years.

About the IUCAA led global team

  • The discovery of UV light was conducted by a team that consists of scientists from India, Switzerland, France, the USA, Japan, and the Netherlands.
  • The team was led by Dr. Kanak Saha.
  • The news of the discovery was published in an online, peer-reviewed, scientific journal called “Nature Astronomy”.
  • The team observed the galaxy that is located in the Hubble Extreme Deep Field.

Key findings could be made

  • It will help to find how the dark ages of the universe ended and transition in the light ages took place in the universe.

NASA’s previous approach

  • NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was commissioned with the same objective as ASTROSAT but it failed to detect any UV emission. 
  • As reported by experts, the background noise in the ultraviolet detector of ASTROSAT is much less than that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

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