Farthest Star galaxies discovered by AstroSat
News Excerpt
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.
Pre-Connect
• More than halfway across the universe, an enormous blue star nicknamed Icarus is the farthest individual star ever seen.
• Normally, it would be much too faint to view, even with the world’s largest telescopes. But through a quirk of nature that tremendously amplifies the star’s feeble glow, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope were able to pinpoint this faraway star and set a new distance record.
• They also used Icarus to test one theory of dark matter, and to probe the make-up of a foreground galaxy cluster.
Highlights
The galaxy called AUDFs01 was discovered by a team of Astronomers from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) Pune.
The discovery 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.
According to Director of Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), this discovery is a very important clue to how the dark ages of the Universe ended and there was light in the Universe.
India’s capability in Space technology has risen to a distinguished level from where our scientists are now offering cues and giving leads to the Space scientists in other parts of the world.