Govt: Saras-3 giving clues on ‘first galaxies’

The indigenouslydeveloped radio telescope Saras-3 has led to a major breakthrough in the field of astrophysics by providing astronomers clues to the nature of the universe’s first stars and galaxies, the Union ministry of science and technology said on Monday.

“In a first-of-its-kind work, using data from Saras-3, researchers from the Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bengaluru, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia, along with collaborators at the University of Cambridge and the University of Tel-aviv, estimated the energy output, luminosity, and masses of the first generation of galaxies that are bright in radio wavelengths,” a senior official of the ministry of science and technology said.

Saras-3 was designed and built at Raman Research Institute and was deployed over Dandiganahalli Lake and Sharavati backwaters in northern Karnataka in early 2020.

The results of the findings were published in a paper by Saurabh Singh from RRI and Ravi Subrahmanyan from CSIRO in the journal “Nature Astronomy” on Monday.

“The results from the SARAS-3 telescope are the first time that radio observations of the averaged 21-centimeter line have been able to provide an insight to the properties of the earliest radio loud galaxies that are usually powered by supermassive black holes,” said Subrahmanyan, former director of RRI.