India News | Matter of Pride That Indian Astronauts Discovered One of Farthest Star Galaxies: Jitendra Singh
Get latest articles and stories on India at LatestLY. Union minister Jitendra Singh said on Tuesday that it was a matter of pride that Indian astronomers had discovered one of the farthest star galaxies using the Astrosat, a multi-wavelength space observatory.
New Delhi, Sep 1 (PTI) Union minister Jitendra Singh said on Tuesday that it was a matter of pride that Indian astronomers had discovered one of the farthest star galaxies using the Astrosat, a multi-wavelength space observatory.
Singh, minister of state in the Prime Minister's Office, said the importance and uniqueness of this discovery could be gauged from the fact that it had been reported in the leading international journal 'Nature Astronomy'.
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"It is a matter of pride that India's first Multi-Wavelength Space Observatory AstroSat has detected extreme-UV light from a galaxy located 9.3 billion light-years away from the Earth," he said in a statement. "The galaxy called AUDFs01 was discovered by a team of astronomers led by Kanak Saha from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune."
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 the NASA, Singh said.
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According to former IUCAA emeritus professor Shyam Tandon, the excellent spatial resolution and high sensitivity was a tribute to the hard work of the UVIT core team of scientists for over a decade.
IUCAA director Somak Ray Chaudhury said the discovery was a very important clue to how the dark ages of the universe ended and there was light. "We need to know when this started, but it has been very hard to find the earliest sources of light," he said.
India's first Space Observatory AstroSat, which has made this discovery, was launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation on September 28, 2015. PTI
(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)