Image Courtesy : www.thehindu.com

The Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics released the statement that India's first multi-wavelength satellite observatory ASTROSAT has discovered an ultimate UV (Ultralight) light from a far away galaxy (9.3 billion light years from Earth). This crucial discovery has been made by a global team led by Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics scientists.

A team of international astronomers from India, the USA, France, Japan, Switzerland and Netherlands and led by Dr. Kanak Saha, Astronomy's Associate Professor at IUCAA, made the discovery which was circulated by Nature Astronomy. As per the release, the team observed the galaxy thorugh AstroSat and the observations persisted for more than 28 hours in October, 2016.

Earlier, NASA's HST (Hubble Space Telescope) which is larger than UV Imaging Telescope (UVIT) could not detect the UV emmissions due to the background noise in the UVIT detector whereas it is much less in AstroSat's detector, as per the reports.

"This is a very important clue to how the dark ages of the universe ended and there was light in the universe," said the Director iof IUCAA, Dr. Somak Raychaudhary.

AstroSat is the first mission, commited to Indian Astronomy, aiming to study celestial sources in X-Ray, UV and Optical bands concurrently. The ability to accredit the simultabneous wave-length observations with a single satellite is one of the unique feature of this mission.

For more information, please visit the link: www.isro.gov.in/astrosat-0.

Source: The Hindu.