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Science & Tech.
Pradeep Kumar

04/03/21 11:35 AM IST

Made in India spectrograph

In news

Indian Scientists have indigenously designed and developed a low-cost optical spectrograph

Highlights
  • It can locate sources of faint light from distant quasars and galaxies in a very young universe, regions around supermassive black-holes around the galaxies, and cosmic explosions.
  • Such spectroscopes were so far imported from abroad involved high costs.
  • The ‘Made in India’ optical spectrograph named as Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC), indigenously designed and developed by Aryabhatta Research Institute of observational sciences (ARIES), Nainital, a
  • It is about 2.5 times less costly compared to the imported ones and can locate sources of light with a photon-rate as low as about 1 photon per second.
  • The spectroscope, the largest of its kind among the existing astronomical spectrographs in the country, has been successfully commissioned on the 3.6-m Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT), the largest in the country and in Asia, near Nainital Uttarakhand.
Application

The spectrograph is presently being used by astronomers from India and abroad to study distant quasars and galaxies in a very young universe, regions around supermassive black-holes around the galaxies, cosmic explosions like supernovae and highly energetic Gamma-ray bursts, young and massive stars, and faint dwarf galaxies.

What is a Spectrograph
  • A spectrograph is a device that separates a signal into its component wavelengths.
  • The easiest way to picture this is thinking about a prism splitting white light into colors.
  • Prism is a type of spectrograph. Specifically, prisms work through dispersion.
  • With the wavelengths dispersed, they can be measured as a spectrum by the detector instead of as one beam.
  • Most spectrographs don’t use prisms, however. They use diffraction gratings, which are more efficient.
Source: PIB

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