The Major Atmospheric Cherenkov Experiment (MACE) telescope is a state-of-the-art ground-based gamma-ray telescope inaugurated in Hanle, Ladakh, on October 4.
Key points
The telescope is located at around 4.3 km above sea level. It is the highest imaging Cherenkov telescope in the world.
- It boasts of a 21-metre-wide dish, the largest of its kind in Asia and second-largest in the world.
- The facility was built by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the Electronics Corporation of India Ltd., and the Indian Institute of Astrophysics.
- MACE’s main goal is to study gamma rays with more than 20 billion eV of energy.
- The telescope can examine high-energy gamma rays emitted from near black holes beyond the Milky Way and which are digesting large volumes of matter.
- Other potential astrophysical targets include gamma-ray pulsars, blazars, and gamma-ray bursts.
Gamma-ray
- Light comes in a wide range of wavelengths but humans can only see a small portion.
- In the electromagnetic spectrum, gamma rays have the shortest wavelength and the highest energy, with each light-particle possessing more than 100,000 electron volts.
- Gamma rays are produced by exotic energetic objects in the cosmos, including rapidly spinning pulsars, supernova explosions, hot whirlpools of matter around black holes, and gamma-ray bursts.
- Because of their high energy, gamma rays are a health hazard. They can damage living cells and may even trigger deleterious mutations in DNA.
- The earth’s atmosphere blocks gamma rays from reaching the ground. Thus, astronomers who want to study objects that emit gamma rays prefer using space observatories.
- When a gamma ray from a cosmic source enters the atmosphere, it interacts with molecules in the air to produce a copious shower of electron-positron pairs.
- As these charged particles travel through the atmosphere at speeds greater than the speed of light in air, they emit a faint blue light, called Cherenkov radiation.
- This radiation has wavelengths typical of violet and blue light of the visible spectrum and of the ultraviolet wavelength range.
(Source: The Hindu)
