Context: 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. The galaxy called AUDFs01 was discovered by a team of Astronomers led by Dr Kanak Saha from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) Pune.

More about news:

The importance and uniqueness of this original discovery can be made out from the fact that it has been reported in the leading international journal “Nature Astronomy” published from Britain. 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.

About Astrosat:

• AstroSat is the first dedicated Indian astronomy mission aimed at studying celestial sources in X-ray, optical and UV spectral bands simultaneously.
• One of the unique features of AstroSat mission is that it enables the simultaneous multi-wavelength observations of various astronomical objects with a single satellite.
• The scientific objectives of AstroSat mission are:

o  To understand high energy processes in binary star systems containing neutron stars and black holes;

o  Estimate magnetic fields of neutron stars;

o  Study star birth regions and high energy processes in star systems lying beyond our galaxy;

o  Detect new briefly bright X-ray sources in the sky;

o  Perform a limited deep field survey of the Universe in the Ultraviolet region.

Reference: https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1650396

https://www.isro.gov.in/astrosat-0

Download PDF