Indian Scientists have indigenously designed and developed a low-cost optical spectrograph that 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 has been named as Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC).
- It has been indigenously designed and developed by Aryabhatta Research Institute of observational sciences (ARIES), Nainital.
- 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.
