Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC)

Why in news?

• Indian scientists have indigenously designed and developed a low-cost optical spectrograph named as Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC).

About the spectrograph:

• The 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 involving high costs.
• The optical spectrograph is named as Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC).
• It was indigenously designed and developed by Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital.
• It can locate sources of light with a photon-rate as low as about 1 photon per second.
• It has been successfully commissioned on the 3.6-m Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT), the largest in the country and in Asia, near Nainital in Uttarakhand.
• It uses a complex arrangement of several lenses made of special glasses that are polished to better than 5-nanometer smoothness to produce sharp images of the celestial sky.
• Photons coming from distant celestial sources, collected by the telescope, are sorted into different colours 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 minus 120 degrees Celsius.
• 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.

Prelims Question

Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera is  an observatory located in:
(a)Uttarakhand
(b)Himachal Pradesh
(c)Ladakh
(d)Arunachal Pradesh

Answer to the Prelims Question