ADFOSC in news
Scientists at ARIES have indigenously designed and developed a low-cost optical spectrograph to investigate faint light sources like distant quasars and galaxies in a very young universe, regions around supermassive black-holes around the galaxies, and cosmic explosions like supernovae and highly energetic Gamma-ray bursts, young and massive stars, and faint dwarf galaxies. Dr. Amitesh Omar led this project with a technical and scientific team, which together researched and developed various optical, mechanical, and electronics subsystems of the spectrograph and camera.
The ‘Made in India’ Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC), 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) and is the backbone of the 3.6-m DOT for observations of extremely faint celestial sources. It uses a complex arrangement of several lenses made of special glasses, polished to better than 5-nanometer smoothness to produce sharp images of the celestial sky. It can observe sources of light with a photon-rate as low as about 1 photon per second.
Earlier such spectrographs were imported from abroad at high costs. However, ADFOSC has been developed at a cost of nearly Rs. 4 Crore, about 2.5 times lesser as compared to the imported ones. “The indigenous efforts to build complex instruments like ADFOSC in India is an important step to become ‘Aatmanirbhar’ in the field of astronomy & astrophysics,” said Prof. Dipankar Banerjee, Director, ARIES. Expertise from various national institutes, organizations, including the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and some micro-small-medium-enterprises, were involved to review and build parts of the instrument serving as an example of effective collaboration. The spectrograph is presently being used by astronomers from India and abroad.
With this expertise, ARIES now plans to commission more complex instruments such as spectro-polarimeter and high spectral resolution spectrograph on the 3.6-m Devasthal telescope in the near future. More details on the 3.6-m DOT and ADFOSC can be obtained from the following URLs:
https://www.aries.res.in/facilities/astronomical-telescopes/36m-telesco…
https://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/116/09/1472.pdf