The information was shared by Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh on Tuesday. (Representational image)

Star galaxies: Indian astronomers have discovered one of the farthest star galaxies in the universe! In a key achievement for the Indian space programme, a team of astronomers headed by Dr Kanak Saha, from Pune-based Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), discovered a galaxy called AUDFs01. The information was shared by Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh on Tuesday. He said that the first Multi-Wavelength Space Observatory by India, “AstroSat”, found the galaxy, which is located at a distance of 9.3 billion light years from the Earth, by detecting extreme UV light from it.

The development has also been reported in “Nature Astronomy”, a leading international journal, according to a statement by the Department of Space. This indicates the importance as well as the uniqueness of the discovery.

The statement said that the uniqueness of this feat was the AstroSat/UVIT detector’s background noise was much less than the detector placed on the US-based NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

While announcing the achievement, Minister Dr Singh congratulated the space scientists of India for reaffirming before the world the capabilities of India in the field of space technology. Professor Shyam Tandon said that the high sensitivity as well as the spatial resolution was a tribute to the hard work and efforts that the scientists of the UVIT team put in for more than a decade.

IUCAA Director Dr Somak Ray Chaudhury said that the discovery would provide clues to the scientists regarding the end of the universe’s dark ages. He added that the scientists needed to know when the universe got light, but it had been very difficult to trace the earliest sources of it.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had launched the AstroSat on September 29, 2015. The development of the country’s maiden space observatory had been undertaken by a team led by Shyam Tandon, a Professor at IUCAA, and the project had been supported by the Indian space agency.