Focus: Prelims, GS-III Science and Technology
Why in news?
As a landmark achievement in Space missions, Indian Astronomers have discovered one of the farthest Star galaxies in the universe – AUDFs01.
Details
India’s first Multi-Wavelength Space Observatory “AstroSat” has detected extreme-UV light from a galaxy located 9.3 billion light-years away from Earth – called AUDFs01.
How did we manage to discover it?
India’s AstroSat/UVIT was able to achieve this unique feat because the background noise in the UVIT detector is much less than one on the Hubble Space Telescope of US based NASA.
AstroSat
- Astrosat is India’s first dedicated multi-wavelength space telescope.
- AstroSat, was launched in 2015, by PSLV-C30 from Sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh).
- It is the first dedicated Indian astronomy mission aimed at studying celestial sources in X-ray, optical and UV spectral bands simultaneously.
- The minimum useful life of the AstroSat mission is expected to be 5 years.
The scientific objectives of ASTROSAT mission are:
- To understand high energy processes in binary star systems containing neutron stars and black holes
- Estimate magnetic fields of neutron stars
- Study star birth regions and high energy processes in star systems lying beyond our galaxy
- Detect new briefly bright X-ray sources in the sky
- Perform a limited deep field survey of the Universe in the Ultraviolet region
