Indian Scientists have indigenously designed and developed a low-cost optical spectrograph named Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC). It can locate sources of faint light from distant quasars and galaxies in a very young universe, cosmic explosions, and regions around supermassive black-holes around the galaxies.
Key Points
- Till now, such spectroscopes were imported from abroad and also high costs.
- This ‘Made in India’ optical spectrograph has been designed and developed by Aryabhatta Research Institute of observational sciences (ARIES), Nainital.
- ARIES is an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India,
- ADFOSC 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.
- ADFOSC is the largest of its kind among the existing astronomical spectrographs in the country.
- It has been successfully commissioned on the 3.6-m Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT).
- DOT is the largest in India and in Asia; it is located near Nainital Uttarakhand.
- The spectrograph uses a complex arrangement of various lenses made of special glasses, polished to better than 5-nanometer smoothness to produce sharp images of the celestial sky.
- The spectrograph sorts the photons coming from distant celestial sources (collected by the telescope) into different colors by the spectrograph and are finally convert them 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 spectrograph is nearly Rs. 4 Crore.
A scientist at ARIES, Amitesh Omar led this project. 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.