Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC)

In News –Indian Scientists have indigenously developed a low-cost optical spectrograph .

About

• The optical spectrograph named as Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC), indigenously designed and developed by Aryabhatta Research Institute of observational sciences (ARIES), Nainital, an autonomous institute of Department of Science and Technology (DST).
• The spectroscope is  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)
• 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 total cost of this instrument is nearly Rs. 4 Crore.

Features –

• This instrument is a backbone of the 3.6-m DOT for observations of extremely faint celestial sources, uses a complex arrangement of several lenses made of special glasses, polished to better smoothness to produce sharp images of the celestial sky.
• Photons coming from distant celestial sources, collected by the telescope, are sorted into different colors by the spectrograph and are finally converted into electronic recordable signals using an in-house developed Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) camera cooled to an extremely low temperature of -1200C.

Significance –

• The indigenous efforts to build complex instruments like ADFOSC in India is an important step to become ‘Aatmanirbhar’ in the field of astronomy & astrophysics.

Present Usage –

• 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 ,the galaxies, cosmic explosions like supernovae and highly energetic Gamma-ray bursts, young and massive stars, and faint dwarf galaxies.

• This collage shows pictures of the 3.6-m Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT), the ‘Made-in-India’ ARIES-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC), and an image of celestial source obtained from the telescope.

Source :PIB