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.