For the first time in India, a liquid-mirror telescope on top of a mountain in the Himalayan range will monitor the sky to identify transient or variable objects such as supernovae, gravitational lenses, space debris, and asteroids.
It is the first in India and the largest in Asia, the Indian Ministry of Science and Technology said on Thursday.
The telescope is in charge of Devasthal, a hill in the northern state of India, Uttarakhand, and will help examine the sky by making it possible to observe various galaxies and other astronomical sources just by looking at the strip of sky passing over it.
Built by astronomers from India, Belgium and Canada, the new instrument uses a 4-meter-diameter rotating mirror made of a thin film of liquid mercury to collect and focus light, the Indian ministry said.
It is located at an altitude of 2450 meters on the campus of the Devasthal Observatory of the Aryabhatta Observational Science Research Institute (ARIES), an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) located in Nainital district, Uttarakhand. .
“Scientists in the three countries spun a pool of mercury, which is a reflective liquid, so that the surface is curved in a parabolic shape that is ideal for focusing light,” the ministry said.
Explaining how the telescope works, the ministry said a thin transparent film of mylar protects the mercury from the wind.
“The reflected light passes through a sophisticated multi-lens optical corrector that produces sharp images in a wide field of view. A large-format electronic camera in the spotlight records the images,” he said.
Professor Paul Hickson (University of British Columbia, Canada), an expert in liquid mirror technology, said that “the rotation of the earth causes images to move through the camera, but this movement is electronically compensated by the camera. This mode of operation increases the efficiency of observation and makes the telescope especially sensitive to faint and fuzzy objects. ”
The Liquid Mirror Telescope or ILMT is the first such telescope designed exclusively for astronomical observations installed at the ARIES Devasthal Observatory, said Dipankar Banerjee, director of ARIES.
Banerjee mentioned that the Devasthal Observatory now houses two four-meter class telescopes: the ILMT and the Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT).
“Both are the largest aperture telescopes available in the country,” he said, adding that he was excited about the implementation of the Big Data and Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI / ML) algorithms. will be implemented to classify the objects observed with the ILMT.
“I hope this project attracts and motivates various young minds of scientific and engineering background to face difficult problems,” he said.
ILMT project researcher Kuntal Misra said the wealth of data generated by the ILMT survey will be exemplary.
“In the future, several young researchers will work on different scientific programs using ILMT data,” he said.
The scientists said that when regular scientific operations begin later this year, the ILMT will produce about 10 GB of data each night, which will be quickly analyzed to reveal variable and transient stellar sources.
The 3.6-meter DOT, with the availability of sophisticated background instruments, will allow for rapid tracking of observations of transient sources recently detected with the adjacent ILMT.
“The data collected from ILMT will be ideal for conducting a deep photometric and astrometric variability survey over a 5-year period,” said project director Jean Surdej (University of Liège, Belgium and University of Poznan, Poland).
ILMT collaboration includes ARIES researchers in India, the University of Liège and the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Belgium, the Poznan Observatory in Poland, the Ulugh Beg Astronomical Institute of the Academy of Sciences Uzbekistan and the National University of Uzbekistan in Uzbekistan, the University of British Columbia, Laval University, the University of Montreal, the University of Toronto, York University and the University of Victoria in Canada.
The telescope was designed and built by the Advanced Mechanical and Optical Systems Corporation (AMOS) and the Liège Space Center in Belgium.
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