India has built the world’s first liquid mirror telescope to detect transient and variable objects such as supernovae, gravitational lenses, spacecraft, and asteroids. The telescope, which is the largest in Asia, is located in Devasthal, a hill in Uttarakhand.
The observatory was built at 2450 metres above sea level on the Devasthal Observatory Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES) campus. “ILMT is the first liquid mirror telescope designed exclusively for astronomical observations, which is installed at the ARIES Devasthal observatory,” said Prof. Dipankar Banerjee, Director, ARIES. The telescope will help explore the sky and allow you to observe several galaxies and other astronomical resources by simply focusing on the edge of the sky, which is going up. The observatory was created by scientists from India, Belgium, and Canada and uses a rotating mirror with a diameter of 4 metres consisting of a thin film of liquid mercury to collect and focus light.
The researchers laid a pool of mercury, which is a reflective liquid, so the surface creeps into a parabolic shape that is good for focusing light. A thin transparent film of mylar protects the mercury from the air. The reflected light passes through a sophisticated multi-lens optical corrector, which produces sharp images in a wide field. Meanwhile, the large-format electronic camera focuses on taking pictures.
Prof. Paul Hickson (University of British Columbia, Canada), a specialist in liquid mirror technology, said the rotation of the earth causes images to float above the camera, but this movement is electronically compensated for by the camera. This mode of operation increases the efficiency of observations and makes the telescope more sensitive to objects that disappear and scatter.
Devasthal Observatory currently has two four-meter ILMT and two Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT) telescopes. Both are the largest diaphragm telescopes available in the country. Prof. Dipankar Banerjee is passionate about the use of big data and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms that need to be implemented to classify objects observed in ILMT.
“The value of the data generated by the ILMT survey would be exemplary.” “In the future, many young researchers will work in various scientific programmes using ILMT data,” said Dr. Kuntal Misra, who is the solver of the ILMT project. After launching regular scientific operations later this year, ILMT will operate to generate approximately 10 GB of data per night that can be quickly analyzed and detected by variable and transient starbursts.
