Marvels of India’s SARAS telescope

New Delhi, Nov 28: India’s SARAS radio telescope has helped scientists determine the properties of the earliest radio luminous galaxies formed 200 million years after the Big Bang, a period known as the Cosmic Dawn.
The findings, published in Nature Astronomy by an international group of scientists, provide an insight to the properties of the earliest radio loud galaxies that are usually powered by supermassive black holes.
A team of scientists, including Saurabh Singh from the Bengaluru-based Raman Research Institute (RRI), estimated the energy output, luminosity, and masses of the first generation of galaxies that are bright in radio wavelengths.
The Shaped Antenna measurement of the background Radio Spectrum 3 (SARAS) telescope — indigenously designed and built at RRI — was deployed over Dandiganahalli Lake and Sharavati backwaters in northern Karnataka in early 2020.
Scientists were able to look back in time just 200 million years after the Big Bang and provide new insight into the properties of galaxies at the time.
Besides RRI, researchers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia, along with collaborators at the University of Cambridge and the University of Tel Aviv participated in the study to estimate the energy output, luminosity, and masses of the first generation of galaxies that are bright in radio wavelengths.
Scientists observed radiation from hydrogen atoms in and around the galaxies, emitted at a frequency of approximately 1420 MHz. (PTI)