GMRT scientists plan focus on universe now

GMRT scientists plan focus on universe now
EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE

PUNE, DEC 3: With the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT) becoming operational, there are plans to fully exploit the world's largest and most powerful low-frequency radio telescope.

Enthused by the success gained in discovering a galactic Supernova in the middle of our galaxy, scientists at GMRT plan to concentrate on observing clusters of galaxies, finding neutral hydrogen clouds, studying remnants of Supernovas and observing pulsars across the spectrum for a better understanding of the universe.

Prof Govind Swarup, head of the Rs 50 crore project who was speaking to reporters during a visit to Narayangaon during the international symposium on ``The Universe at Low Radio Frequencies'' called it a quest to understand the origin of the universe and also an attempt to study the formation of new galaxies. In the past two months, GMRT scientists have discovered a lot of stars exploding. The data gathered from this will help in a better understanding in the formation of galaxies, he said.

GMRT will throwits doors open to the world's scientific community to conduct studies. ``We will seek proposals from countries and lend our facilities to improve their data gathering,'' he said.

US scientists Dr W Miller Goss, director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory expected a number of proposals to be shortly sent to GMRT for observing results. A joint project is currently in progress with the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) to study galactic nebulae, he said. ``When Prof Swarup first told us about this project 15 years ago, most of us suspected that this was not possible,'' he said. Impressed by the state-of-the-art telescope which consists of 30 dishes, each 45 m in diameter, spread over 25 km, he said that such a project would not have been possible in the United States.

However, scientific data collected by observing naturally produced radio waves also requires optical facilities for a better understanding of the results. Prof S S Jha, director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research(TIFR), Pune revealed that there is a proposal to set up a three metre optical telescope. A two-metre telescope is already operational at Leh. However, he said that there is a proposal to collaborate with international agencies to utilise their large optical telescopes to complement their data gathering.