Vainu Bappu Observatory
Encyclopedia
| Organization | Indian Institute of Astrophysics Indian Institute of Astrophysics The Indian Institute of Astrophysics , with its headquarters in Bangalore , India, is a premier national institute of India for the study of and research into topics pertaining to astronomy, astrophysics and related subjects.... |
|---|---|
| Location | Kavalur Kavalur Kavalur is a village in the Papanasam taluk of Thanjavur district, Tamil Nadu, India.- Demographics :As per the 2001 census, Kavalur had a total population of 1010 with 496 males and 514 females. The sex ratio was 1036. The literacy rate was 48.45.... , vellore Vellore Vellore It is considered one of the oldest cities in South India and lies on the banks of the Palar river on the site of Vellore Fort. The city lies between Chennai and Bangalore and the Temple towns of Thiruvannamalai and Tirupati... , Tamil Nadu Tamil Nadu Tamil Nadu is one of the 28 states of India. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu lies in the southernmost part of the Indian Peninsula and is bordered by the union territory of Pondicherry, and the states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh... , India India India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world... |
| Coordinates | 12°34′0"N 78°50′0"E |
| Altitude | 700 m (2,297 ft) |
| Webpage | http://www.iiap.res.in/vbo/vbo.html |
| Telescopes | |
| Vainu Bappu Telescope | 2.3 meter reflector |
| Zeiss telescope | 1 meter reflector |
| Telescope Telescope A telescope is an instrument that aids in the observation of remote objects by collecting electromagnetic radiation . The first known practical telescopes were invented in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 1600s , using glass lenses... |
75 centimeter Cassegrain reflector |
The Vainu Bappu Observatory, or VBO for short, is an astronomical
Astronomy
Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...
observatory
Observatory
An observatory is a location used for observing terrestrial or celestial events. Astronomy, climatology/meteorology, geology, oceanography and volcanology are examples of disciplines for which observatories have been constructed...
owned and operated by Indian Institute of Astrophysics
Indian Institute of Astrophysics
The Indian Institute of Astrophysics , with its headquarters in Bangalore , India, is a premier national institute of India for the study of and research into topics pertaining to astronomy, astrophysics and related subjects....
. It is located in the Javadi Hills
Javadi Hills
The Javadi Hills are a range of hills, one of the largest in the Eastern Ghats, in Vellore District, in the northern part of the state of Tamil Nadu in southeastern India. About 50 miles wide and 20 miles long, they are bisected into eastern and western sections by the Cheyyar and Agaram rivers,...
Kavalur, near vaniyambadi
Vaniyambadi
Vaniyambadi is a town and a municipality, part of the Vellore district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The major population comprises people following Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and Jainism population...
of vellore district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu is one of the 28 states of India. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu lies in the southernmost part of the Indian Peninsula and is bordered by the union territory of Pondicherry, and the states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh...
, 175 km south-east of Bangalore
Bangalore
Bengaluru , formerly called Bengaluru is the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka. Bangalore is nicknamed the Garden City and was once called a pensioner's paradise. Located on the Deccan Plateau in the south-eastern part of Karnataka, Bangalore is India's third most populous city and...
.
Equipment
The observatory is home to the Vainu Bappu Telescope, the largest telescope in India. It has a diameter of 2.3 meters and was first used in 1986. Along with the Vainu Bappu telescope, the observatory has two other telescopes: A 1 meter Zeiss manufactured and another 75 centimeter cassegrain reflector currently being refurbished. The observatory also has a Fabry–Pérot interferometer.- Technical details
- Primary Mirror Diameter: 234 cm
- Prime focus: f/3.25 with a scale of 27".1/mm
- Cassegrain focus: f/13 with a scale of 6".8/mm
- Guiding: remote, manual guiding
- Instruments available
- At PRIME focus:
- Imaging Camera with a 3-element Wynne corrector
- At CASSEGRAIN focus:
- Medium resolution Spectroploarimeter
- Medium resolution Optometrics Research Spectrograph (OMRS)
- At PRIME focus:
- Detector
- 1024x1024 pixels TEK CCD, with a pixel size of 24 micrometres
Discoveries
The 1 metre telescope is associated with two unique discoveries in the solar system. In the year 1972, atmosphere was detected around JupiterJupiter
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System. It is a gas giant with mass one-thousandth that of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in our Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn,...
's satellite Ganymede
Ganymede (moon)
Ganymede is a satellite of Jupiter and the largest moon in the Solar System. It is the seventh moon and third Galilean satellite outward from Jupiter. Completing an orbit in roughly seven days, Ganymede participates in a 1:2:4 orbital resonance with the moons Europa and Io, respectively...
and in the year 1977, rings were discovered around the planet Uranus
Uranus
Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. It has the third-largest planetary radius and fourth-largest planetary mass in the Solar System. It is named after the ancient Greek deity of the sky Uranus , the father of Cronus and grandfather of Zeus...
. In 1984, Kavalur reported the discovery of a thin outer ring
Planetary ring
A planetary ring is a ring of cosmic dust and other small particles orbiting around a planet in a flat disc-shaped region.The most notable planetary rings known in Earth's solar system are those around Saturn, but the other three gas giants of the solar system possess ring systems of their...
around Saturn
Saturn
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest planet in the Solar System, after Jupiter. Saturn is named after the Roman god Saturn, equated to the Greek Cronus , the Babylonian Ninurta and the Hindu Shani. Saturn's astronomical symbol represents the Roman god's sickle.Saturn,...
.
On 17 February 1988, a new minor planet was discovered using the 45 cm Schmidt telescope. It has been named 4130 Ramanujan
4130 Ramanujan
4130 Ramanujan is a main-belt asteroid discovered on February 17, 1988 by R. Rajamohan at the Vainu Bappu Observatory near Kavalur, India.- External links :*...
after the Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Srīnivāsa Aiyangār Rāmānujan FRS, better known as Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan was a Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions...
. This is the first such discovery from India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
in the 20th century.
Scientific activities
Front-line research is being carried out with the help of the optical telescopes at Vainu Bappu Observatory using several focal plane instrumentational facilities. The ongoing programmes include observations of starStar
A star is a massive, luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity. At the end of its lifetime, a star can also contain a proportion of degenerate matter. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, which is the source of most of the energy on Earth...
s, star clusters, nova
Nova
A nova is a cataclysmic nuclear explosion in a star caused by the accretion of hydrogen on to the surface of a white dwarf star, which ignites and starts nuclear fusion in a runaway manner...
e, supernovae, blazars, galaxies, optical imaging of gamma-ray burst fields, stellar populations, solar system objects and many others.
The telescopes at the observatory had started with relatively modest focal plane instruments and later on graduated to more sophisticated ones. These include cameras for fast photography, photoelectric photometer
Photometer
In its widest sense, a photometer is an instrument for measuring light intensity or optical properties of solutions or surfaces. Photometers are used to measure:*Illuminance*Irradiance*Light absorption*Scattering of light*Reflection of light*Fluorescence...
s, a single-channel photoelectric spectrum scanner, a medium resolution spectrograph
Spectrograph
A spectrograph is an instrument that separates an incoming wave into a frequency spectrum. There are several kinds of machines referred to as spectrographs, depending on the precise nature of the waves...
, a quartz-prism calibration spectrograph, infrared
Infrared
Infrared light is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength longer than that of visible light, measured from the nominal edge of visible red light at 0.74 micrometres , and extending conventionally to 300 µm...
photometer, image tube spectrograph, a Universal Astronomical Grating Spectrograph (UAGS from Zeiss), high-resolution echelle spectrograph and a polarimeter
Polarimeter
A polarimeter is a scientific instrument used to measure the angle of rotation caused by passing polarized light through an optically active substance....
. Photographic plates were the principal detectors in the early days. Presently the charge-coupled device
Charge-coupled device
A charge-coupled device is a device for the movement of electrical charge, usually from within the device to an area where the charge can be manipulated, for example conversion into a digital value. This is achieved by "shifting" the signals between stages within the device one at a time...
s (CCD) have replaced the photographic plates. Some micro-processor-controlled photon counting systems were designed and fabricated which have been used in a variety of observational projects. A fibre linked echelle spectrograph is under construction.
On campus maintenance facilities like aluminising plants for coating the telescope mirrors, mechanical and electrical workshops, electronics labs, along with a liquid nitrogen
Liquid nitrogen
Liquid nitrogen is nitrogen in a liquid state at a very low temperature. It is produced industrially by fractional distillation of liquid air. Liquid nitrogen is a colourless clear liquid with density of 0.807 g/mL at its boiling point and a dielectric constant of 1.4...
plant are at hand for the smooth functioning of the observatory. Highly advanced technical facilities like SUN workstations are available at the telescopes for handling the CCD data, along with specialised data reduction packages such as IRAF, STSDAS and DAOPHOT. Communication facilities, like e-mail via VSAT satellite connection, are available for all users for the telescopes.
A programme of ultralow dispersion spectroscopy was successfully used to survey stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud
Large Magellanic Cloud
The Large Magellanic Cloud is a nearby irregular galaxy, and is a satellite of the Milky Way. At a distance of slightly less than 50 kiloparsecs , the LMC is the third closest galaxy to the Milky Way, with the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal and Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy lying closer to the center...
(LMC). Of the ten supernovae observed so far, SN1987A in LMC was observed in great detail using the 1 m and the 75 cm telescopes despite its low elevation in the southern sky, proving the worth of the geographic location of Kavalur. In fact the observations of the supernova were started within 48 hours of the discovery.
Observational studies of evolved stars, in particular studies related to their evolutionary aspects, carried out at this observatory, have received critical acclaim and international recognition. The observational facilities at this Observatory have yielded many Ph.D theses for the scholars of the Institute as well as of other institutes and universities in the country
Field stations
While the Vainu Bappu Observatory is one of the field stations of the BangaloreBangalore
Bengaluru , formerly called Bengaluru is the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka. Bangalore is nicknamed the Garden City and was once called a pensioner's paradise. Located on the Deccan Plateau in the south-eastern part of Karnataka, Bangalore is India's third most populous city and...
based Indian Institute of Astrophysics
Indian Institute of Astrophysics
The Indian Institute of Astrophysics , with its headquarters in Bangalore , India, is a premier national institute of India for the study of and research into topics pertaining to astronomy, astrophysics and related subjects....
, which is primarily devoted to research activities using the optical telescopes, the other field stations at the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory
Kodaikanal Solar Observatory
The Kodaikanal Solar Observatory is an solar observatory owned and operated by Indian Institute of Astrophysics. It is located on the southern tip of the Palni Hills 4 km from Kodaikanal town, Dindigul district, Tamilnadu state, South India....
and at Gauribidanur
Gauribidanur
Gauribidanur is a historical town in Kolar district; now a part of Chikballapur district in the state of Karnataka, India. It is about 75 km from Bangalore, and 25 km from the Educational Hub of Muddenahalli-Kanivenarayanapura. kannada is spoken widely as primary luanguage...
are equipped for solar observations and radio astronomy programmes respectively.
A present one of the challenging projects undertaken by the Institute, is the installation of a 2 metre remotely operated optical and infrared telescope at Hanle
Hanle
Hanle can mean:* Hanle , located in eastern Indian Ladakh, near the Chinese border** The Indian Astronomical Observatory, adjacent to Hanle village, location of the highest major astronomical telescopes in the world and colloquially known as Hanle** Hanle Valley, valley containing Hanle village,...
in the Ladakh
Ladakh
Ladakh is a region of Jammu and Kashmir, the northernmost state of the Republic of India. It lies between the Kunlun mountain range in the north and the main Great Himalayas to the south, inhabited by people of Indo-Aryan and Tibetan descent...
region of Himalayas
Himalayas
The Himalaya Range or Himalaya Mountains Sanskrit: Devanagari: हिमालय, literally "abode of snow"), usually called the Himalayas or Himalaya for short, is a mountain range in Asia, separating the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau...
. This will be the highest ground-based telescope in India. A new field station called Centre for Research and Education in Science and Technology (CREST) is also being set up at Hosakote near Bangalore
Bangalore
Bengaluru , formerly called Bengaluru is the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka. Bangalore is nicknamed the Garden City and was once called a pensioner's paradise. Located on the Deccan Plateau in the south-eastern part of Karnataka, Bangalore is India's third most populous city and...
.