The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Wednesday, 2nd September 2020 congratulated Indian astronomers on the discovery of one of the farthest Star galaxies in the universe that’s estimated to be located about 9.3 billion light-years away from Earth.
India’s first Multi-Wavelength Space Observatory AstroSat, launched by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) on September 28, 2015 detected the extreme-UV light from a galaxy located 9.3 billion light-years away from Earth. The galaxy called AUDFs01 was discovered by a team of astronomers led by Dr Kanak Saha from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) Pune.
On this discovery of India, NASA Public Affairs Officer, Felicia Chou said, “NASA congratulates researchers on their exciting discovery. Science is collaborative effort around the world and discoveries like these help further humankind’s understanding of where we come from, where are we going, & are we alone.”
India’s AstroSat/UVIT was able to achieve this unique feat because the background noise in the UVIT detector is much less than one on the Hubble Space Telescope of US-based NASA.The Director of IUCAA, Dr Somak Ray Chaudhury, stated that the discovery offers a very important clue to how the dark ages of the Universe ended and there was light in the Universe. He said, “We need to know when this started, but it has been very hard to find the earliest sources of light”.
