SARAS-3 Radio Telescope

Why in News?

• SARAS-3 Radio Telescope, scientists have recently determined the properties of a radio luminous galaxy that was formed just 200 million years after the Big Bang, a period known as the Cosmic Dawn

Highlights

• Researchers have used data from SARAS 3 to throw light on the energy output, luminosity, and masses of the first generation of galaxies that are bright in radio wavelengths
• The new Information on the period Cosmic Dawn gave an insight into the properties of the earliest radio loud galaxies that are usually powered by supermassive black holes.
• SARAS 3 had improved the understanding of astrophysics of Cosmic Dawn by telling astronomers that less than 3% of the gaseous matter within early galaxies was converted into stars, and that the earliest galaxies that were bright in radio emission were also strong in X-rays, which heated the cosmic gas in and around the early galaxies
• SARAS is a niche high-risk high-gain experimental effort of RRI (Raman Research Institute).
• SARAS-3 was deployed over Dandiganahalli Lake and Sharavathi backwaters, located in Karnataka, in early 2020.
• SARAS aims to design, build and deploy in India a precision radio telescope to detect extremely faint radio wave signals from the depths of time, from our “Cosmic Dawn” when the first stars and galaxies formed in the early Universe.
• Radio telescopes collect weak radio light waves, bring it to a focus, amplify it and make it available for analysis.
• They help study naturally occurring radio light from stars, galaxies, black holes, and other astronomical objects.
• These specially-designed telescopes observe the longest wavelengths of light, ranging from 1 millimetre to over 10 metres long. For comparison, visible light waves are only a few hundred nanometers long, and a nanometer is only 1/10,000th the thickness of a piece of paper. In fact, we don’t usually refer to radio light by its wavelength, but by its frequency